Ironheart needs a cooler suit

After meeting Riri Williams in 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, her own Disney+ series, Ironheart, is finally coming out this summer. Riri, played by the insanely charming Dominique Thorne, is a super-genius MIT student, just like Tony Stark once upon a time. In Wakanda Forever, we see her build the first version of her own flying robot suit, which lends her the superhero moniker “Ironheart”. 

Riri was cool and fun in Wakanda Forever—a bright spot in an otherwise dark film—but we didn’t get to know much about her. Now, with a six-episode series on the way, we get to learn who Riri Williams is in the MCU, and a trailer dropped this week teasing the show. It looks…fine.

The problem is definitely not Thorne or the cast, which is top notch. Co-starring alongside Thorne are Anthony Ramos, Alden Ehrenreich—hope Marvel works out better for him than Star Wars did—Lyric Ross, Jim Rash (reprising a small role from Captain America: Civil War I bet no one remembers), Cree Summer, and Sacha Baron Cohen. The problem is two-fold, with the first problem being the wait between Wakanda Forever and this series. 

Ironheart filmed in 2022 and was supposed to be released in late 2023, but it was delayed as part of Bob Iger’s edict to pump the brakes at Marvel and Lucasfilm, both of which were materially harmed by being forced to produce too much stuff by short-lived CEO Bob Chapek, in order to beef up Disney+’s offerings. While slowing down might help Marvel overall, it hurts Ironheart because it is now three years on from Wakanda Forever. Which leads to the second problem, which is: who is out here looking for Riri?

Don’t get me wrong, she’s a cool character and maybe Dominique Thorne can do something interesting with her, but that long hiatus between character appearances hurts when people 1) don’t really know your character or 2) know you as an actor. Thorne made her screen debut in 2018’s If Beale Street Can Talk, she can most recently be seen in Freaky Tales. She’s a talented actress and like I said, incredibly charming, but she doesn’t have enough face/name recognition with audiences to be a draw on her own (yet). 

If Ironheart had come out within a year of Wakanda Forever, you can see how momentum would be on its side, but now, there is no momentum for this show. They’re going to do it anyway, because to Marvel’s credit, they don’t sh-tcan projects. They stick by what they’ve made. I just don’t expect Ironheart to do much this summer. I want good things for Dominique Thorne, so I hope the series is better than this trailer looks, because I am a Marvel fan who LIKES this character, and I am deeply uninterested in Ironheart.

Also, the suit is dumb. It looks like a Transformer. I get that they don’t want to look too much like Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit, but this Ironheart suit does not look cool. Gotta get Riri into a cooler suit, then maybe we’ll get somewhere.