If You Didn’t Know The MCU’s ‘Ironheart’ Was Out Today, Who Can Blame You?

I’m genuinely not sure I’ve seen a Disney Plus MCU entry released with such little fanfare as Ironheart, at least if we’re not counting some completely memory-holed offerings like 2017’s Inhumans.

Tonight, Disney Plus is dropping Ironheart, its latest MCU production that is limping to release through no fault of its own, with little promotion for a series most people may have forgotten exists, or at least forgotten it’s out today.

Ironheart has been an odd project from the start. It was championed by Ryan Coogler of Black Panther (and now Sinners) fame, who put its star, Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams, into a supporting role in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But that was back in 2022, and allegedly Ironheart has been finished for a long while now. Williams’s character is now a distant memory from her first appearance.

Disney Plus is dumping out the series in two three-episode batches, the first of which airs tonight and the second next week. It’s not completely a first; it released Echo as a binge drop, but that show had the benefit of a big Kingpin role and even a Daredevil cameo. And it was promoted more than Ironheart has been.

Ironheart marketing has consisted mainly of two trailers released somewhat recently, where the biggest point of praise is the return to “mechanical” Iron Man suits rather than the dreaded nanotech the MCU has used for years now.

In the comics, Riri Williams was introduced in 2016 as a high-level genius who manages to construct her own battle armor in the vein of Tony Stark. Ex-Stark Robert Downey Jr. probably had the best bit of promotion for Ironheart when he went out of his way to issue a message to the cast:

Producer Ryan Coogler spoke to Deadline about how the blending of magic in tech of the show actually serves to lead into Avengers: Doomsday and the return of Downey Jr, at least thematically:

“It’s so crazy to be putting this movie out now, at the time where AI is on the front of everybody’s mind, technological ethics are on the front of everybody’s mind. But also — we didn’t know it was going to be Dr. Doom and the Avengers when we first started, but he’s a guy in publishing who’s most famous for fusing technology and magic, so it’s a great sample of things that are to come in probably what’s going to be the biggest movie in Marvel history.”

Despite Disney dropping it seemingly to die with close to no real promotion or hype, is Ironheart actually good? Well, we have no sense of that either, given that as I write this, there are zero critic reviews live for the show, meaning either screeners were not given out, or an embargo is going to drop right on top of launch.

I’m in no way rooting for this show to fail (and lord knows it’s attracted the attention of the hostile “DEI” crowd already), but the circumstances around its release do not signify a series that’s prone to do very well. Sure, it could surprise us the way Agatha All Along was a bigger hit than anticipated, but this feels different. I hope I’m wrong.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.