Ryan Coogler Reveals Why Now Is The “Perfect Timing” For Ironheart: “It’s So Relevant Today”
The team behind Marvel’s new series breaks down the challenges and benefits of the ever-changing MCU.
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.).
Filling the void the original Avengers left behind was high priority for Marvel: In 2020, the studio was fast-tracking a solo project for Ironheart. Wakanda Forever was set to be the springboard for the character, and that meant developing her solo series at the same time Coogler was filming.
“Wakanda was shooting while we were in prep,” Samantha Bailey, director of Ironheart’s first three episodes, tells Inverse. “There’s a lot we didn’t know. We had some access to the script, but that’s always an evolving thing.”
Coogler was filming Wakanda Forever while the Ironheart team prepped in Atlanta: “Ryan and I tried to be in five places at once.”
Coogler, fortunately, was no stranger to this shooting style, as Black Panther shot “basically back-to-back” with one of Marvel’s biggest crossover films, Avengers: Infinity War.
“When we did the first Panther, I sent all of my actors to the Russos to do Infinity War,” Coogler tells Inverse. “I was having to work with Joe and Anthony on what Wakanda would look like while they were trying to prep it, and giving them parameters of what we were building... You’ve got to communicate and walk out on faith, right?”
“The challenge is you can’t be in two places at once,” adds showrunner Chinaka Hodge, “and I think Ryan and I tried to be in five places at once.”
Coogler shot Wakanda Forever while Hodge and her team prepped Ironheart in Atlanta, forcing the normally hands-on director and producer to trust in his crew. “We hired the right people. They nailed it, man,” Coogler says. “And one of the benefits, I could tell you, the benefit of it coming out [now]... It’s so relevant to today.”
Ironheart was originally set to premiere sometime in 2023, a year after Riri’s debut in Wakanda Forever and three years after her solo project was first announced. However, a flurry of circumstances pushed the series back time and again, from the writers and actors guild strikes in 2023 to Marvel’s internal struggles with quality over quantity. Ironheart was briefly pulled from the slate altogether, causing some fans to fear it’d never get its time in the spotlight. Fortunately, Marvel has since righted itself — and though it’s taken longer than expected to bring Ironheart into the world, Coogler compares the delays to a blessing in disguise.
Ironheart faced a few delays before crossing the finish line, but Ryan Coogler believes “it’s perfect timing for this show.”
“If it had come out when Wakanda Forever had come out, I don’t think it would’ve been the right timing for conversations around responsible, ethical behavior around technology,” Coogler says of Ironheart. Our current “political climate” has also, hopefully, primed audiences to “[spend] time with this young Black girl who’s overqualified and it puts a target on her back.”
The delays also allowed Ironheart to put some distance between Riri and the late Tony Stark, who serves as her mentor in the comics. The characters never got to meet in the MCU, leaving Hodge and Ironheart’s writers to remix Riri’s origins after Wakanda Forever.
“The challenge was establishing her as affected by Tony, but as making her own legacy,” Hodge explains. “I wanted to create other challenges and other people in her world, so that if there were a movie down the line, for example, she could have a different kind of interaction with Tony Stark. But we wanted to populate [Ironheart] with characters that we hadn’t seen in the MCU before. That way, we have fodder for going forward.”
In the multiverse, anything is possible. At least now Riri Williams is ready for anything.
