Ironheart Is a Surprisingly Solid Marvel Mash-Up, Even If It Does Feel a Bit Late

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If you feel like you’ve been hearing about a TV adaptation of Marvel Comics’ Ironheart (aka Riri Willams) for the better part of the decade, you’re not wrong. Marvel announced the project back in 2020, at the heat of a moment where the studio was aiming to basically crank out superhero shows year-round across Disney+ and in theaters.

But as fatigue set in over the next year or so, Marvel reversed course and vowed a return to quality over quantity—which left shows like Ironheart, greenlit during that Marvel gold rush, in a precarious position on the release calendar. Which is one reason we first met Dominique Thorne’s young genius inventor Riri Williams back in 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, then heard little else for the past three years until now.

But Riri’s live action series is finally here, picking up with the character in the wake of Wakanda Forever and settling into a true origin story for the relatively new hero (Riri has only been around just shy of a decade going back to the comics, introduced in 2016 in connection to an ongoing Iron Man arc). Marvel has learned a thing or two about pacing this deep into its TV run, and keeps Ironheart to a slim six-episodes, as opposed to overly stretching the series beyond its natural limit, which is one reason the show can manage to still feel tight even while pushing through the clunkiness of tying to a movie that is now a few years—and several Marvel movies—old.

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Having seen all six episodes, Marvel made the right call not to stretch out the release cadence and just make this a two-week drop for the full series. The first three episodes premiere on June 24, with the final three episodes a week later on July 1. This is a bingeable show, and Marvel thankfully seems to have realized that.

Thorne does a solid job as the centerpiece star, even when she leans a bit melodramatic at times, but it’s the supporting cast that lifts Ironheart from average to good. Anthony Ramos goes all-in on the conflicted, magical antagonist The Hood (aka Parker Robbins), and Parker’s crew is rounded out with an eclectic bunch of thieves and hackers, while Alden Ehrenreich is a delightfully twisty surprise thrown into the mix. Lyric Ross is also delightful as hell as Riri’s best friend Natalie.

As for what fans can expect from the series? We’ve reached a point where we’re so deep into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its various offshoots that Ironheart can literally be described without having to search for any reference beyond the Marvel world. A fact that’s both impressive and terrifying as we wind down the second decade of the MCU era.

There’s a lot of mixed-up DNA in Ironheart, and if you’re a fan of Marvel fare, there will be plenty to like. The vibe feels closest to Marvel’s Runaways series that ran on Hulu from 2017-2019, focused on a group of teenage heroes on the run. The series also works hard to bring the setting of Chicago to life (that’s right, we’re finally leaving the boroughs of NYC for this one!), with shades of the approach Netflix’s Luke Cage series took to building out the street-level feel of Harlem. There’s also a dash of that Ms. Marvel teenage silliness, though Ironheart carries itself a bit more seriously. Of course, there are also some Iron Man qualities (this is a show about a super-suited hero, after all), and the series throws back to the earlier feel of the original Iron Man film, which was a welcome surprise.

One subplot also tiptoes into a story about artificial intelligence and ethics, wrapped around a very complicated emotional beat. Some of it works, though the narrative sidesteps actually finding any answers when it comes to the harder questions it’s trying to get credit for asking.

But one of the toughest challenges for any Marvel show at this point in the saga is to justify its reason for existing in the first place — to make a case for why this character matters and why this story needs to be told. And though it takes a bit to get flying, Ironheart does find its case and makes it by the end, putting some heart and humanity into this brilliant young woman who has decided to try and follow in Tony Stark’s footsteps and become an iron-clad hero. There wasn’t much space to explore her motivations in Wakanda Forever, as she was just a bit player in that wider story. But learning more about her family, her trauma, and her life here puts real stakes into Riri’s evolution into becoming a hero in her own right.

As far as where Ironheart fits into the wider MCU, comic-book fans and Easter-egg hunters will have a field day with this series. It’s a rare balance of telling a street-level story in a way that truly feels like it’s set right in the same wider world of Iron Man and Doctor Strange. It went harder than I expected, and to places and characters I never saw coming, which was a nice surprise for a show that at first felt like it was aiming to carve out its own corner of the world with less connectivity more akin to a project like Moon Knight or Echo.

Whatever Marvel has planned for Riri Williams next, there’s no doubt that Ironheart is a more-than-capable launch pad to send her off to the Young Avengers or whatever Marvel might be cooking up with its stable of teenage heroes.