For better or worse, Marvel’s Cinematic Universe has a monopoly on kid geniuses. Every young hero feels like a tech wiz of some kind — perhaps that’s why the MCU’s take on Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), aka Ironheart, feels like such a departure from her counterpart in the comics. By the time she made her debut in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, so many aspects of Ironheart’s character had been claimed by other heroes. Spider-Man (Tom Holland) co-opted her surrogate mentorship with Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) before the latter’s untimely demise in Avengers: Endgame. Shuri of Wakanda (Letitia Wright), meanwhile, got dibs on the high-tech lab with unlimited resources, not to mention the burden of succeeding another Avenger gone too soon. Consciously or not, all that forced Marvel Studios to remix Riri entirely, with its efforts culminating in Ironheart.
Three years after Black Panther’s Ryan Coogler brought Riri into the MCU, the director has passed the torch to showrunner Chinaka Hodge. Her six-part series continues Coogler’s efforts with sanguine flair. Admittedly, it does take a few tries to build a better Ironheart — but whatever glitches we get are in service of the kind of origin story the MCU has sorely been missing.
