Ironheart and Superhero Fatigue
It's 2025 and a streaming TV show is our barometer for our strange times of divisiveness
July 1st marked the final release of Ironheart, a Marvel TV show streamed on Disney+. One might call this show “beleaguered,” but wow, that would be an incredible understatement. Yes, it’s a science fiction, action-type of show with dramatic elements as are all Marvel properties based on comic books. You may not be into that stuff, so bare with me, there’s a larger story at work here. With the release of this show, the hate and division in our discourse has really bubbled up and I wanted to take a look at that.
*** SPOILER WARNING - If you haven’t seen this show, don’t read further. ****
Beleaguered
The word beleaguered gets thrown around a lot, but Ironheart is a prime example of a difficult upbringing. This property wrapped filming in 20221, nearly three years before it’s 2025 release. So much had happened over that time: COVID ended, Marvel decided they were going to make a ton more content to fill Disney+, but then they decided to slow down the content train. Ironheart was suck in the middle of that top-down chaos.
Couple this with the fact that this show is part of a larger storytelling structure, something called the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). This larger narrative ties every property that is part of the MCU together with characters and through-lines. The challenge, however, is if the story doesn’t connect to the greater universe, it throws off everything. Easter eggs don’t make sense. The wrong characters are introduced. So, coming into the larger universe three years late is going to throw off everything. This was likely meant to be released just after Riri’s introduction in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, but missed that by years and and entire “phase” of the MCU. The show was released in just two blocks of three episodes2, something unusual for a Marvel live-action series, making people think the show was reluctantly dumped by Disney.
Is It Good?
Yes, it is. The show is a short six episodes that starts off a bit slow, but gets better. Riri is dealing with two big things: The feeling of not fulfilling her self-made potential, and the incredible weight of loss. All of this is set against the backdrop of ambition, what that ambition costs, its limits, and what people will do to realize it in the shadow of others.
The show’s characters are the focus in good ways, and the struggles feel sincere. While the main character Riri can be arrogant at times (much like Stark was), she’s not without the ability to keep this in check when needed. The action is fun, usually makes sense and there are a ton of inspired new ways they’ve found to show the same old thing. Look at the way the show’s title cards are expressed in every episode as if they’re part of the world. It’s almost like a fourth-wall break.
Sure, it has its problems. The show does feel like it was chopped into smaller pieces. Some things happened way too fast. Others, like Mephisto's introduction, feel so disjointed. In one scene, Hood’s talking to Mephisto and he comments on why his accent has changed, but it's just passed off, and no more comes of it. You never really understand it, but Mephisto is known as a shape-shifter in the comics (and likely is in this interaction with The Hood). Mephisto must have been filmed as a bigger character in the first iteration of this show. Maybe he even had a dedicated episode. The suggestion at the end that he's made deals with Fortune 500 leaders also seemed like a sly reference to Tony Stark being one of them. More than this, the Hood's skin affliction seemed eerily similar to the palladium poisoning Stark had in Iron Man 2. Nine of this was fleshed out well in Ironheart, or maybe years ago in development it was.
The Hood’s just a weak villain. His powers were wildly inconsistent. Ramos played the madness and ethos well, but there's just nowhere to go after the disappearing ability is shown a couple times. He just starts using guns that appear to do special things, but this is never really explored. His father is something he was striving to replace, but the reveal fell flat. The consequence of dealing with dark magic and Mephisto seemed minor to The Hood character. It was heavily implied that his soul was the cost of Mephisto’s deal, but after the hood was taken by Riri, he seemed to be perfectly fine. Let’s not talk about how she could simply cut a portion of the hood away, and those magical powers alerted no one. This kind of seemed like a missed opportunity with the overlap of technology and mystical being a very interesting theme.
Reaction
The critics, who are no real barometer of anything these days, liked it with 86% on Rotten Tomatoes as I write this. That’s something. Beyond the critical opinion, little positivity revolves around this show even though I’m starting to see more on Tik Tok over time.
But, the backlash elsewhere has been swift and severe. On the Internet Movie Database, people rated the series and abysmal 3.8 of 10 at the time of writing. Something like this might garner a 7 or maybe 8 if it tracked its appearance of a quality.
Even going back to the trailer, the hate was evident. On 9,895,304 views, the YouTube video garnered 219,420 likes and a whopping 547,269 dislikes. Wow. The comments on the trailer are scorching:
”If they played this on a plane I would walk out”
“I wanna create something iconic, Creates something that already exists”
”The bravest thing about this show is that its actually being released. “
”What bothers me most, though, is the way the show prioritizes messaging over storytelling. It feels like a checklist representation, themes, ideology all crammed in without much thought for whether they actually serve the narrative. Representation should be powerful. It should mean something. But when it's done this superficially, it just feels hollow. Instead of building characters that resonate universally, the show leans into stereotypes — especially with some of its Black characters — in ways that are not just lazy, but borderline offensive. It doesn’t feel empowering. It feels like a missed opportunity.”
”Destroying Ironman's legacy. Nobody asked for it. It’s an ICONIC FLOP.”
What’s going on here, then? It seems like much of the hate is directed at the show’s tone, and its stereotypical depiction of black characters, especially those who live in the South Chicago area. Part of he backlash seems to also revolve around “wokeness” and having some characters here included for the sake of representing inclusiveness, but just for the sake of including them and not because it makes sense.
Of course, the inevitable comparisons to Iron Man come with the territory. The fact that Riri creates an Iron suit that it just about exactly what Iron Man made, but Marvel reveals no connections to the two other than perhaps inspiration (they both went to MIT). For many, the Iron Man character was peak Marvel movies, and Ironheart is lacking in that charm.
But, people were hyped for Mephisto!
For at least five years, we’ve been hearing from all sorts of MCU pundits and watchers that the Mephisto character was going to show up. He was rumoured to be big bad instead of Kang, he was rumoured to be in Wandavision, and then Agatha All Along after it. After every turn, there were whispers that we’d see Mephisto manipulating things in the background of just about every property. So, with Mephisto’s actual arrival, it you’d think it would get people excited. No so, it seems. Few people were talking about this.
Dominique Thorne, the actor who plays Ironheart had this to say about the introduction of Mephisto,
“The true Marvel fans know that Marvel always has a plan,” Thorne adds. “So, to know that they’ve chosen to introduce him here with Riri Williams, with Parker Robbins, it’s strategic and it has a place in the larger storytelling and in the larger twists and turns that this phase will continue to unveil. And it is just a joy to get a seat on that ride.”3
The character of Ironheart is a popular one. Riri’s live-action introduction was positive, as is the character in the comics. There may be a bit of a challenge for Riri to come out of the shadow of Ton Stark when he was done so well, but one would think Marvel was aware of that. When Marvel could do no wrong pre-COVID, Ironheart the series may have been much-loved.
I don’t expect that Ironheart will see a second season and we may never see her again, period. Marvel is surely recalibrating after what can only have been a money loser (on a reported $150 million budget). It remains to be seen what will become of Mephisto, a character with such great potential.
Soon, the attention will be shifting to a property with “Super” expectations. I think the outcome is, by now, predictable.