On Tuesday, the Disney+ series Ironheart will kick off what may prove to be an important summer for superhero movies—and for Marvel Studios in particular.
Despite all of the rave reviews that Thunderbolts* received from critics and audiences upon its release in early May, the Jake Schreier–directed film will end its theatrical run as one of the lowest-grossing movies in the history of the MCU. Thunderbolts* may have felt like a turning point for Marvel Studios from a creative perspective, but audiences’ interest is clearly waning—particularly when it comes to projects that feature lesser-known title characters. “Marvel’s calculus has changed,” Shawn Robbins, Fandango’s movie analytics director, told Variety. “We’re in a new era where not every Marvel movie is going to hit $1 billion.”
In light of all the ups and downs of the Multiverse Saga, there is certainly some pressure on The Fantastic Four: First Steps to succeed in late July. The marketing for the summer blockbuster has been ramping up over the past several weeks, even as Kevin Feige and other Marvel executives have to be wondering what went so wrong with the box office for Thunderbolts*. (Likely adding to the confusion: Disney’s live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch is inching its way toward a potential billion-dollar haul.) Amid this uncertain landscape for the studio, Marvel is quietly releasing its second live-action TV series of the year in Ironheart.
Created by Chinaka Hodge and produced by Ryan Coogler, Ironheart marks the return of Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the young, genius inventor from Chicago who made her debut in 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The six-episode miniseries will be rolled out in a somewhat odd release structure: The first three installments will premiere on Tuesday, with the remainder of the episodes arriving in a second wave the following week. The first batch of episodes was directed by Sam Bailey, while the latter half of the series was helmed by Angela Barnes.
Ahead of Ironheart’s release, here’s everything you need to know about Riri’s introduction in Wakanda Forever, the character’s ties to Iron Man, and more.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
In Wakanda Forever, Riri Williams is introduced as a brilliant student at MIT. Before long, it becomes clear that she might even be too brilliant for her own good. Riri completes other students’ projects as a side hustle—but that’s not what gets her into trouble. When Riri creates a first-of-its-kind Vibranium detector for a class assignment, both to prove her professor wrong and simply because she can, she starts to attract a lot of undesirable attention without even realizing it. Riri’s invention gets taken by the CIA and is used to uncover a Vibranium deposit buried deep in the ocean. As a result, Namor—the ruler of the underwater kingdom of Talokan—learns that humanity is on the verge of discovering his people’s secret city in search of its Vibranium resources. And after destroying the Vibranium detector and killing everyone involved in the CIA operation, Namor decides that the scientist who created this machine needs to be killed as well.
Although Riri was minding her business at MIT, she’s suddenly thrust into the middle of the emergent conflict between Talokan and Wakanda. Princess Shuri and General Okoye visit Riri on campus in an attempt to bring her safely back to Wakanda, and Riri eventually leads them to a garage where she keeps her personal projects, including her stepfather’s car and her very own Iron Man–style suit of armor. But the brief tour quickly becomes an escape when the FBI comes searching for Riri as well, and Riri, Shuri, and Okoye split up, with Riri taking to the skies in her suit, Okoye borrowing Riri’s prized car, and Shuri nabbing one of Riri’s motorcycles. They manage to outrun the feds, except they’re no match for Namor’s warriors, who arrive riding on the back of an orca. I know we’re here to talk about Riri, but the modes of transportation that the Talokanil use really never get old:
Namor’s followers kidnap Shuri and Riri and bring them back to Talokan so their king can decide their fate. They both eventually get saved by Nakia, the former Wakandan spy and the late King T’Challa’s romantic partner. But Nakia’s rescue mission starts a war between Talokan and Wakanda, and Riri ends up staying in Wakanda to fight alongside her new Wakandan friends. The young inventor nearly gets killed when Namor floods the throne room while she’s there with Queen Ramonda, but Ramonda saves her life, sacrificing her own in the process.
Riri is crucial to Wakanda’s fight against Talokan: She helps Shuri figure out a way to defeat Namor in combat, and also builds a new, high-tech Ironheart suit—crafted with Wakanda’s advanced and extensive resources—that she uses to join the battle.
At the end of the film, Shuri advises Riri to stop her “homework-for-hire” business and reclaims the fancy new suit that Riri got to use for a single day. And before sending her back to school in Cambridge, Shuri also gifts Riri her stepfather’s beloved car, newly refurbished after Shuri managed to find all of its broken pieces, which fell into the river during their fight with the Talokanil. As Riri revels in its beauty, she explains the meaning it holds for her. “It’s my dad’s car,” Riri says to Shuri. “We used to work on it before…” Riri solemnly stops short of finishing her sentence, and Shuri simply nods in understanding.
Wakanda Forever leaves much of Riri’s origin story a mystery, but this final interaction is one of the more revealing looks into the experiences that have shaped her. Thorne’s Riri Williams is a consistent source of comic relief in an incredibly emotional film that explores grief in the wake of T’Challa’s (and Chadwick Boseman’s) death. But she’s also shown to be someone who’s still dealing with loss as well—even if she has seemingly buried herself in work to avoid it, just as Shuri did after losing her brother.
Following the introduction that Wakanda Forever provided for Riri, Ironheart now has the opportunity to retrace Riri’s steps to MIT and explore who she is and where she came from, as the series takes her away from her studies in Cambridge and back to her home in Chicago.
Continuing Iron Man’s Legacy
This may be a bit obvious, but Ironheart is very much inspired by Iron Man. In Wakanda Forever, Shuri asks Riri if she’s working on Stark Tech when she sees some of the designs on display in her garage. And the moment Riri dons her suit for the first time in the film, an FBI agent cries out, “Oh shit, she’s got an Iron Man suit!”
But the connections go deeper than the kind of advanced tech that Williams wears (and that Tony Stark made famous), or even their shared alma mater, MIT. Although their ties have been relatively understated in the MCU thus far, Riri was actually introduced in Invincible Iron Man (2015) no. 7, written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by Mike Deodato Jr. She even becomes the protagonist of the series after Stark falls into a coma. Stark entrusts her with the task of filling his figurative suit, and while he isn’t there to mentor her in person, he is in spirit: Stark created an AI construct of himself to help train Riri in case anything happened to him, ensuring that he could stick around like a Force Ghost to guide her on her path to heroism.
Ever since Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark sacrificed himself during the climactic conclusion of Avengers: Endgame, the MCU has been without its Iron Man. The absence of the armored Avenger played a major role in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, as Peter Parker grappled with the void that his former mentor left behind, and that he was expected to fill. It’s been six years since that Spider-Man film was released, and that void is still there—even as Downey prepares to return to the MCU as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday.
Riri Williams isn’t Iron Man. Nor does she need to be, either within the world of the MCU on a narrative level or as the latest attempt by Marvel Studios to launch a new series around a lesser-known character. However, she is Iron Man’s spiritual successor. And the legacy that Stark left behind, along with the one that Riri is trying to forge for herself, will surely be explored as she takes the spotlight in Ironheart.
Ironheart
In Ironheart, Riri is headed back to Chicago. Marvel Studios is taking a different approach with this character by building out her backstory after introducing her in Wakanda Forever. The Multiverse Saga has, for better or for worse, been debuting new superheroes at a rapid rate. Most of the time, they’ve appeared as the protagonists of their own Disney+ series before appearing in a film, as did Kamala Khan in Ms. Marvel and Jennifer Walters in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. But with Riri, Marvel is working the other way around.
Thorne leads a cast that also features Anthony Ramos (Hamilton), Lyric Ross (This Is Us), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story), and Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) in an undisclosed role. If that last actor’s inclusion made you raise your eyebrow, well, you’re not alone. It’s hard to imagine the man who’s starred in some of the wildest comedies and most controversial satires of the 21st century joining the MCU in Ironheart. It’s only fitting that the character whom he long has been rumored to be playing is none other than Mephisto, the demonic villain who dominated every fan theory, week after week, when viewers prematurely forecasted his arrival in WandaVision in early 2021.
If Baron Cohen is indeed playing Mephisto in Ironheart, the versatile actor may be the perfect fit for the role of the devious shape-shifter. And Marvel Studios seems to be leaning into the intrigue of Mephisto’s potential introduction in its marketing. In a recent Instagram post that showcases the titles and release dates of each of the miniseries’s six episodes, Episode 5’s name—“Karma’s a Glitch”—is written differently from the others: The letter “M” is highlighted in red.
Regardless of Mephisto’s inclusion, Ironheart will pit technology against magic, as the series will also introduce Ramos as Parker Robbins, another Marvel Comics villain who dons a red hood to access dark magic. And as the show’s second trailer seems to suggest, Riri herself may be looking to combine her scientific knowledge with the mystic arts, thereby pushing boundaries that even Stark never did.
Ironheart has plenty of intriguing selling points—and yet it’s hard not to question Disney and Marvel’s schedule for the series. Circling back to the aforementioned release structure, Ironheart will release all six of its episodes in just two weeks, with a three-part premiere and a three-part finale. Disney+ has been far from consistent in the way it delivers its TV series, but the only Marvel TV show whose approach even remotely resembles this one would be Echo, which premiered all five of its episodes on the same day in January and remains one of the least-viewed MCU series. When you factor in how much Ironheart’s marketing has been overshadowed by the simultaneous promotion of Fantastic Four: First Steps, the nearly three-year wait since Wakanda Forever, and the fact that the series was developed before Marvel Studios’s major overhaul of its TV business in late 2023, Ironheart’s compressed rollout may indicate the studio’s lack of faith in the product and its desire to dump it quickly. If not that, it could just be a sign of the streaming service’s continued struggles to find an optimal release cadence.
One way or another, Riri Williams’s return is set to close out Phase 5, just as her introduction in Wakanda Forever coincided with the conclusion of Phase 4. And regardless of the noise surrounding it, Ironheart will be another opportunity for Marvel to center a story on a new voice in the MCU.
