The Main Reason Why This Movie Sucked

It botched the origin of Iron Man, which was pretty much a perfect origin story that did not needed such extreme alterations as we saw in this movie. It should've been more focused on the Stark as a character, shouldn't be revolving around that dumb subplot about some magical entities from ancient times, and, of course, The Mandarin shouldn't been the villain. They should've just hinted at his presence, but never show him. Of course, it's stupid to assume that the creators of this animated flick wanted from the beginning to go with this type of story - no. Doctor Strange animated movie came at the same time, but it was very faithful to the origin of Strange. I'm pretty sure that they were forced by Marvel to change the origin in this flick because of the Iron Man movie that was going to come out next year, that was already using classic origin of Iron Man. They did not wanted for both movies to be carbon copies of each other. Personally, I don't think it was a rational decision. DC didn't changed the story in their Year One direct-to-video movie just because Batman Begins had similar story bits.