Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, it’s been said, is kind of like one massive TV show. Each blockbuster is akin to an episode of television, with one storyline informing another — and some, occasionally, shooting at the same time.
It was like this for Ironheart, the long-gestating spinoff of director Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The latter was the closing of a chapter in more ways than one: specifically, a farewell to the late Chadwick Boseman, who’d brought Black Panther into the MCU. But the film also represents new beginnings, with the passing of his mantle to Letitia Wright’s Princess Shuri, the reinvention of the antihero Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), and the arrival of Ironheart (Dominique Thorne), a quasi-successor to Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.).
