Everything you need to know about Ironheart before Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Marvel's teenage tech genius is about to make her big-screen debut. Here’s a look at her comic book origins and what her role might look like in Wakanda Forever
Film Features Ironheart
You can make the case—and we will—that one of Marvel’s objectives with the MCU was to push the diversity envelope that’s been a huge factor in the comics for decades. The studio came out of the gate strong by casting Samuel L. Jackson as Col. Nick Fury, originally a white character in the comics. Black Panther set the bar for representation in the MCU, and the success of that film fueled Marvel’s ongoing commitment to build a world that looks very much like ours demographically. So, it makes sense that the sequel Wakanda Forever is where the character Ironheart will be introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Quick facts
- Ironheart was created by Marvel Comics in 2016, making her one of the newer characters to show up in the MCU
- Played by Dominique Thorne (Beale Street, Judas And The Black Messiah), Ironheart will make her live-action debut in the Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever, which opens on November 11, only in theaters
- Ironheart’s own six-episode show will premiere on Disney Plus in the fall of 2023, which will be part of Phase Five of the MCU
Comic book origins
Ironheart, whose real name is Riri Williams, is a Black 15-year-old super-genius who was raised in Chicago. In the comics, she’s a good kid, but she’s introverted and doesn’t have a lot of friends. A huge fan of Iron Man, she builds her own suit of armor in her dorm room at MIT. This, of course, catches Tony Stark’s attention and he becomes her mentor. She and Tony Stark have the same dry and sarcastic sense of humor, and adventure, supervillain fights, and her coronation as queen of a small eastern European nation follow. (No, we’re not making that last one up.) Ironheart is also a member of the young superhero team The Champions, alongside Ms. Marvel and Kate Bishop’s Hawkeye.
Ironheart isn’t a household name (yet), but the character has been popular enough in the last six years to have appeared in three series of Iron Man comics, three series of her own, several Marvel cartoons, and she has her own animated special. Oh, and she’s in three Marvel video games. She’s got some heat.
The character has faced creative controversy, however. There was a harsh backlash to an early cover featuring her bared midriff when she was underage. Marvel received more criticism when it came to light that all of Ironheart’s writers were white men, and, in fact, there were no black women writers on Marvel’s staff at that time. Oops!
Ironheart and Iron Man
It’ll be interesting to see how deeply her relationship with Tony Stark is explored in the movie. He was quick to support her superhero journey in the comics, and after Tony’s death, his dismembered consciousness becomes the first Jarvis-like AI for her suit. Sadly, it looks like this won’t be Robert Downey Jr.’s return to the MCU, since his name is not currently on the cast list. This Is Us actress Lyric Ross has been cast as Natalie, RiRi’s best friend. In the comics, RiRi eventually used Natalie’s voice to represent her armor’s AI as well, so the movie could take that route.
Ironheart’s role in Wakanda Forever
In the movie, Riri is 19 years old and she’s still an MIT student from Chicago. Director Ryan Coogler said that Riri will serve as Shuri’s foil, and although game recognizes game, they’ll clash over their different personalities and backgrounds, despite their similar skills and genius-level intellect.
Riri appears in all three trailers that have been released so far. In the first, she shares a Wakanda salute with Shuri in her lab, and later pounds an iron heart out of a sheet of metal. In the second trailer, Ironheart exuberantly takes off into the night sky.
We get even more action in the third trailer, which shows her flying over the streets above a motorcycle and car, explosions going off behind them. From previously released photos and footage that were shot at MIT, we know that Shuri is on the motorcycle, and earlier trailers show Okoye in that same setting, so we’re assuming there was some sort of road trip to Cambridge to find Riri. There’s also an awesome scene of Ironheart taking on Namor.
There’s no straight explanation in any of the trailers about why she’s in Wakanda or what she’s doing there—you know, why her?—but the possibilities for tweaking Riri’s origin story are endless. Her family could be Wakandan, or she could be tied somehow to Shuri and T’challa through the outreach center the two founded in Oakland at the end of Black Panther.
Or, since Riri would have been a great tech-genius substitute for Shuri during the Blip, maybe she hasn’t come to Wakanda, she’s returning there. Whatever her plot turns out to be, all of Marvel’s post-Avengers: Endgame shows and movies have addressed the consequences of the Blip and the Blip-back, so it’s not a reach to assume that Wakanda Forever will do the same.
From the trailers, it seems the movie’s overarching theme is how Wakanda is recovering from T’Challa’s unexplained but seemingly untimely death. In the comics, Riri has a tragic backstory of her own—her father died before she was born and her stepfather and Natalie were killed in a drive-by shooting (see: white male writers). Tony Stark died in the comics too, so if the movie brings any of that in, she’s carrying some heavy emotional weight on her shoulders.
Ironheart’s future in the MCU
Ironheart is premiering on Disney+ next fall, but we don’t have a definite date. What’s even more intriguing is that Riri will be the fifth member of the Marvel comics team The Champions—later known as the Young Avengers—to show up in the MCU recently, following Elijah Bradley and Joaquin Torres (who both appeared in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier), Kate Bishop, and Kamala Khan. She’s the sixth if you count Skaar, who was in the last episode of She-Hulk, and he would make an easy stand-in for the team’s Young Hulk. Now, this could be an Easter egg-colored coincidence, or it could be a winning Bingo card whose prize is a feature or show of their own. Time and the next MCU phase will tell.
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Ironheart! And her sidekick, Titanium Spleen!
And what about the vaccine? What are her thoughts on that?
The studio came out of the gate strong by casting Samuel L. Jackson as Col. Nick Fury, originally a white character in the comicsAnd then, years before the MCU, a black character inspired by Samuel L. Jackson.
Yeah, like most of us know this. How did they forget this? All they had to say was the original 616 was a white man but in later years he was changed in the ultimate U to be someone based on Samuel L Jackson.
they aren’t paid enough for these pieces to research or edit
SLJ says (and I haven’t looked into whether it’s verified) that he agreed to let them use his likeness in The Ultimates on the condition that he get to play Fury in the movies if they ever went that route.
That’s how you think 5 moves ahead.
Sounds like kayfabe bullshit, it’s not like the people editing the comics had any pull with the movie side of things. Not like many comic artists have been sued for heavy use of photo reference in the past 60 years, either
Yeah, looking into it further it was Millar/Hitch who just went ahead and did it, but Jackson was highly supportive after the fact since it worked out quite well for him.
yeah that felt like a troll to get people to comment. like it’s not ‘incorrect’ but it does make people go ‘well actually…’ smart writing if your goal is to get people to write comments.
Nick Fury (Earth-1610) originally did not look like SLJ, he looked like this.
What’s even more intriguing is that Riri will be the fifth member of the Marvel comics team The Champions—later known as the Young Avengers—to show up in the MCU recently Ironheart is also a member of the young superhero team The Champions, alongside Ms. Marvel and Kate Bishop’s Hawkeye. Young Avengers #1 came out in 2005.Champions #1 came out in 2016.While Kate Bishop was an early member of Young Avengers, she has never been a member of the Champions….but, by all means, keep telling me what I need to know…
Don’t you know you cannot correct a woman on nerdy matters? Doing so means you got soggy knees or something.
Yea this article is…really not good.
– The AV Club
Ironheart is also a member of the young superhero team The Champions, alongside Ms. Marvel and Kate Bishop’s Hawkeye a teenaged version of the X-Men’s Cyclops.**I know that they weren’t on the same iteration, but I still think it’s funny.
They probably just googled “Marvel Champions team” and took the first year they saw
Yep, there was no crossover on either team. You could argue Patriot joined the Champions, but it wasn’t Eli Bradley under the mask so I don’t count that.
For what it is worth Ironheart/Riri is the face of Target’s ad this fall. I think this gives a good sense of what she will about in the MCU. The ad does look neat too.
Synergy synergy synergy companion series tangential supporting character franchise IP synergy merchandise synergy.Like…. seriously, who is still excited for this shit?And yes, get off my lawn while I yell at a cloud.
Black nerds mostly, but also fuck you.
“this shit” includes every bit of weird, dumb MCU “Phase 73, featuring a Disney+ streaming show and an AR game for your phone and don’t forget to play Avengers Afterlife on PS5 and find hidden clues to the Make Mine Marvel Podcast in your HULK SMASH Happy Meal!And I fucking KNOW that this is the industry and has been forever, but it depresses the shit out of me that for whatever reason people are perfectly okay KNOWING THIS themselves and swallowing it and getting mad at people like me for rolling their eyes at it. And why? Because pew pew comic book stories!
I’m sort of there with you in the frustration at how much of our lives are dominated by corporate messaging. Propaganda is real, folks, and it isn’t always Nazis demanding we massacre people. It seems obvious to me at this point (not that I came up with this notion, just that I’m hard-pressed to find any way to push back against it) that modern American individualism is a story that was carefully crafted by guys like Don Draper, that simultaneously tells us that we’re all individuals while also ensuring that we unthinkingly buy whatever they’re shilling. It’s kind of amazing, really. Buying this thing will let you show off your own personal style! Just like the other six million people who bought the same thing.Looking at your specific comment here, it’s notable to me that you mention several things that I haven’t seen at all, probably because I go out of my way to avoid ads. We have no ad-supported TV here, and we use ad blocking software everywhere we can. If there’s a Disney+ AR game, PS5 game, podcast, or Happy Meal all being pushed for synergy along with BPWF (and I’m sure there are), I haven’t seen it. I know shit like that exists, but I’ve managed to avoid it.
I have no idea where I’m going with this. Just wanted to have a conversation, I suppose.
There isn’t any of that stuff that I know about. It is, you will likely be unsurprised to hear, me being hyperbolic. That is both a thing I enjoy doing and a thing that sometimes bites me in the ass because I sometimes (or often, depending on one’s view of me) conflate my genuine reactions with my purposely overblown reactions. And sometimes I get annoyed when people take my hyperbole for genuine, which is my own fault. Or when they take my genuine for hyperbole. Which is also my own fault. And I’m only human, so sometimes I’m not even clear to myself what I mean or how I mean it. We are imperfect messengers. (Although it could reasonably be argued to me that sometimes I should know when to rant and hit the Cancel button instead of the Publish button.)What tends to crawl up my ass about the MCU stuff is how tribally defensive people will get about it. Filmmakers have been railing against tentpole franchise blockbuster stuff for ages and ages but Martin Scorsese has critical comments about comic book movies and suddenly a legion of fanbois and fangrrls shit-talks one of our greatest living filmmakers. Even suggest that all the interconnectivity of the MCU narratives is primarily a byproduct of marketing and sales and you’ll get dismissed or told you’re out of touch. And what are they defending? The product of one of the biggest, most rapacious corporations on the fucking planet.
Several years ago, someone in their defense of Marvel movies compared them to sports, in that it’s perverse and contrarian to dislike them just because other people like them. I really liked that post, since it perfectly articulated the idea that participating in monoculture is an obligation, and being bored by monoculture is an affectation. I also like that post because it articulated what I find most exhausting about Marvel movies: sitting on my ass for three hours trying trying to engage with a conflict when I don’t give a shit who wins.
And so much of that narrative interconnectivity fights the engagement. Because if the protagonist of one MCU movie “loses”, who cares? There are 10 more heroes out there to take their place. And now those heroes are being developed in their own TV shows so the movies don’t have to do the work of character development, they can be all plot and battle scenes! (And as Multiverse of Madness demonstrated, they are SHIT stories.)
You’re SO brave and such a good person.
Synergy is when the movies adapt a character from the comics?
Who will now be in her own Disney+ series. Who also has her own cartoon. And is featured in other cartoons.But remember! This is a Black Panther movie! It’s about Black Panther! (But also this Ironheart character because we have merch to push and a show to premiere.)
I am, but only because it annoys you.
Fair enough.
Black Panther is one of the most racist movies ever made. Marvel scumbags pretend that the CIA are good guys trying to help Africans. The fans of Marvel movies are too dumb and racist to learn the actual history of Africa and the CIA so that little big of fascist propaganda went right over their heads. It’s so funny how this has never occurred to the writers of The Root which shows you how little they know about world history.
Please, by all means, tell us all about the real world history of Wakanda.
i mean they had an opportunity to introduce a new character they already had plans for in an earlier installment where she could logically fit (a beneficiary of the wakandan outreach center, presumably) so why would they not
Oh wait this is the girl from that fucking Target commercial, that’s the real actress and character??
Marvel received more criticism when it came to light that all of Ironheart’s writers were white men, and, in fact, there were no black women writers on Marvel’s staff at that time. Oops!You write this and then you never mention Eve L. Ewing, who wrote the solo Ironheart series for twelve issues. You know. A black woman who wrote Ironheart’s first (and so for only) solo series.Man was this article very poorly researched. Like, do more than five seconds of googling, okay?
to be fair Eve didn’t create Riri or come up with her backstory (that was Brian Michael Bendis) and her hiring was due in part to that controversy in first place
It probably wasn’t poorly researched — just selectively researched.
It’ll be just as mediocre as the first one but people will pretend it’s the most important, greatest film ever?
I do hope they make her less annoying than she is in the comics. In her origin she came off as grating and seemed like a Mary Sue from the stories I read with her. The MCU has done really well reworking characters for the better so I am cautiously optimistic about Ironheart.Also her having 3 separate comic series in the span of 6 years doesn’t mean that she is popular, it shows that they keep cancelling and rebooting her over and over.
What’s even more intriguing is that Riri will be the fifth member of the Marvel comics team The Champions—later known as the Young AvengersLol no. The Champions are over a decade later, and are unrelated, there is no overlap in membership.Riri is another character that fizzled out. She doesn’t show up much. When did she last appear beyond a background panel? Slott’s Iron Man series that ended in 2020? The awful Champions series that ended last year? I think she was in a Devil’s Reign issue, maybe with a line of dialogue but maybe not?She’s not a bad character concept, a genius who makes herself a superhero, but the execution was never great. I liked her initial series but nothing beyond that. She’s an Iron Man character, but debuted when Tony was dead and they don’t have any previous connecting tissue, so they don’t know each other. So she doesn’t play a role in Iron Man comics. Her backstory is weirdly confusing; I recall her dad was murdered(?) and then her stepdad was murdered(?) (all taking place before her first appearance).Anyway, I’m sure Marvel will be publishing a new Ironheart #1 to coincide with the show because synergy.
I feel like her potential was severely undercut by Civil War 2.5: This time it’s just kids or something. I haven’t heard much about any of their younger heroes since then. And I’d barely heard anything about Iron Heart before.
Handing Champions to Jim Zub was a mistake too, basically killed the popularity of the team.
Oh yeah… Outlawed. That was…a thing.
Wait, so you’re saying Riri Williams and Victor Von Doom could be sitting across from each other hashing out trade negotiations? And maybe tips on the best way from keeping one’s armor from rusting?
they’ll clash over their different personalities and backgrounds, despite their similar skills and genius-level intellectsomething something vaccines
Anyway, cool. Riri’s cool. Say what you will about Bendis, but you’ve gotta appreciate how he’s been responsible for some of the few new/next generation characters to really stick at Marvel. Miles, RiRi, Jessica Jones.
gonna be the annoying pedantic comics fan to say 1) Kate Bishop is a Young Avenger, not a Champion and 2) the Champions don’t “become” the Young Avengers as the YA precede the current version of the Champions by a decade
Hell, I provided a bulleted list lol.
Iron seems like a poor choice to make an artificial heart.
That was the actual basis for one of Asimov’s science fiction stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregationist_(short_story)
Just one I’d like one of these articles to say, “You do not need to know anything about Ironheart before Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The movie will tell you what you need to know.”
They also make a great pair of jeans.
In the movie, Riri is 19 years old and she’s still an MIT student from Chicago….her stepfather and Natalie were killed in a drive-by shooting (see: white male writers)
How about see any weekend murder report from Chicago? Has nothing to do with “white males”, does it?
Quick question, how long do we have to wait before we admit to ourselves that we don’t like these replacement characters as much as the original ones without being labeled a bigot? Asking for a friend. He’s Black. I have a Black friend… I mean… I have LOTS of Black friends… Why wouldn’t I?
I was in Target the other day and I saw the Iron Heart action figure. I thought it looked pretty bad. Hopefully it’s not indictive of the final film product. Actually all the Wakanda Forever toys look pretty bad.
These toys are the cheap-o ones. The Marvel Legends Ironheart certainly looks better, but they’re trying to merge her current suit with Iron Man’s here, and by that, I mean the Ultimate Iron Man, and that wasn’t a good looking suit.
I have nothing against the character Ironheart, honestly, but she’s really emblematic of a lot of the things that make me hate Bendis. Marvel had just introduced an extremely similar character like a year before Riri was created, Lila Rhodes (War Machine’s niece) and gave her her own miniseries. The two characters are essentially identical (both are even young black women if Marvel wanted to be really cynical and gross about new characters) but Bendis either didn’t know or more likely just didn’t care about inter-company continuity. It’s that laziness and lack of care that makes me really dislike him as a superhero writer. Anyways, this was just me yelling at clouds but I wanted to say something because it is the internet after all.
The Champions—later known as the Young AvengersNope, the Champions and the Young Avengers are two completely different teams.The Young Avengers in the comics started as legacy versions of heroes, but consisted of initially:
Iron LadPatriotHawkeye (Kate)WiccanHulklingWhereas the Champions consisted of teen heroes disillusioned by the idea of being on the heavy hitter teams and not being able to do the kind of work they thought was necessary and the aftermath of Civil War II. They were also legacy characters, with the exception of two (Snowguard and a time-displaced teen Cyclops):
Ms. Marvel (Kamala)IronheartSpider-Man (Miles)BrawnNova (Sam Alexander)Viv VisionWasp (Nadia)There was no crossover on these teams, unless you’re referring to maybe the very first version of the Champions. Well, you could argue Patriot later on, but it wasn’t the same guy under the mask.
White male writers also killed off Batman’s parents and Spiderman’s parents and uncle. Is it a conspiracy?