Marvel Releases Ironheart Images and Plot Details
As Daredevil: Born Again struggles to convince Marvel’s spurned audience to give it a shot, the studio is hyping up its next Disney+ effort, which may be the most insufferable of them all. Today, Marvel released images from Ironheart, the upcoming series based on yet another unliked legacy character from the comics. Ironheart stars Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, a teenage girl who builds her own Iron Man armor and becomes Ironheart, another knock-off of one of the Avengers that Marvel is determined to make us embrace, no matter how much money it loses them. Riri Williams made her MCU debut in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and her show has been delayed a few times, at one point being removed entirely from Disney’s release schedule, which made people suspect it was being shelved altogether. No such luck, though, as Ironheart will premiere on Disney+ on June 24, 2025. Below are the images from Ironheart, courtesy of Cosmic Marvel:
New look at Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams in the Disney+ ‘IRONHEART’ series.
Premiering on June 24. pic.twitter.com/kBTChVixws
— Cosmic Marvel (@cosmic_marvel) March 21, 2025
That armor looks boring. It is apparently supposed to be an early version of the final Ironheart armor, but it still doesn’t pop the way Tony Stark’s early armor did. It was dull, but it had attractive qualities that made it cool beyond its rudimentary trappings; even the clunkiness of the Mach 1 armor was endearing, giving it weight to make up for its lack of sleekness. Riri’s is just a less colorful version of her final suit, which, I assume, is the one from Wakanda Forever (which I didn’t see).
ComicBookMoive.com has some quotes from Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of television, streaming, and animation, about how the suit will look and function on the show:
“There’s a full practical suit… It doesn’t obviously do all the crazy things that the suit does, but we used a lot of techniques that go all the way back to the first Iron Man film, where we actually had a practical suit on set… First of all, just even as a visual reference for the CG artists having the actual suit there, even if it had to do like CG things and open and close and stuff… it had all the perfect lighting reference, so the emulation is just spot on. It’s awesome. I mean I’m sure it’s going to be in the Marvel lobby in a few months.”
Having a practical suit is a good thing; the Critical Drinker often talks about how the Iron Man armor – and all of the MCU tech, really – has changed from a more tangible mechanical construction in the earlier movies to nanotech, which is all CGI and feels almost liquid, losing the effect of seeing the engineering side of Tony Stark. I like the idea of bringing that tangibility back; it’s a shame it’s for Ironheart and not Iron Man, but what can you do? Hopefully, this is a signal that they’ll be getting back to this in general because I’d really like to see that for Doctor Doom. (Doom better not be using nanotech for his suit; I want to see him lift that metal mask in a medieval-looking gauntlet and put it on while his back is turned before finally showing us his masked face.) Winderbaum also confirms that Ironheart takes place after Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which makes me wonder why she’s got prototype suits. Didn’t she have her finished suit in Wakanda Forever? Why are they going backwards in developing their characters (and I use the term “developing” loosely)? Black Panther first appeared in Captain America: Civil War, so his solo movie had him fully formed and having retained the lessons he learned from the earlier film, not having to rebuild a suit or anything.
As for what the plot of Ironheart will be like, Brad Winderbaum has some tidbits:
“She fought in Wakanda, she fought Namor, she had this great adventure. But the day-to-day struggle is still real. She’s Riri Williams. She’s gonna do what she needs to do to get by for her and her family and everyone else. And it does lead her down some roads… [Riri] returns to her hometown of Chicago. There, she discovers secrets that bring technology and magic into conflict, leading her on an exciting and dangerous adventure.”
It’s weird that Winderbaum says, “She’s Riri Willaims,” like he’s referencing some universally beloved character everyone knows. This is the problem with these “hand-down-the-mantle” replacements; Marvel is trying to prop them up to be on the same level as the legends they’re replacing, and it doesn’t work because it feels entirely artificial. You have to earn the ability to talk about a character like that, and when you haven’t, the audience can tell they’re being sold a bill of goods. The reference to the conflict between science and magic suggests that those Mephisto rumors are true, which is a real bummer. Imagine introducing a character that big and important in Ironheart, which most people won’t even see. The rumors say that Sacha Baron Cohen will play Mephisto, and I can already see Marvel making him look like some generic guy in a suit instead of the demonic creature he is in the comics. (Remember the Nicolas Cage Ghost Rider, where Mephisto and Blackheart were just Peter Fonda and Wes Bentley in coats?) The idea of magic and science combining is something I’d like to see introduced by Doctor Doom – a character who actually matters and one of whose most famous stories has him matching wits with Mephisto – but they’re fast-forwarding through his development to get to Doomsday, so he’ll just be following in Riri Williams’ footsteps, I guess. My biggest question is whether Marvel will pull an Echo with Ironheart and release the whole series at once just to get it over with. I guess it’ll depend on the response to the trailer whenever that arrives, but after Daredevil: Born Again, I can’t imagine they expect much from any of their upcoming shows.
Let us know what you think of the Ironheart images and details in the comments!
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Comments (1)
That casting of Borat as Mephisto is right on the nose. Good call there. Did Iron Heart sell in comics? Do black girls care about this character at all? To be more on the nose, it actually would make sense for her to get the suit and the tech, especially if her family were Government workers, which would be accurate. Like giving tech to Joy Reid or Michelle Obama or something like that. They are the ones that got to go to Ivy League and got the opportunities that others did not.
I have zero interest in this character, unless the comic and story was used to lampoon reality, as it should. Who’s that other girl? Like Jasmine Crockett or Maxine Waters in a tech jacket. Great. Just great.
This is where they missed the mark as a character like a Kamala Khan would be more accurate as Iron Heart since all the H1-B workers are from that area and Big Tech gives them all the jobs. See, that would be good writing, either of those situations because that is reality, whether people want to agree or not.