Here's the first trailer for Marvel's Ironheart

After a lot of waiting, Marvel has finally released a first trailer for its upcoming streaming series, Ironheart. It's been cutting it close: the series has been scheduled for June 2025 for a while, it's only now (well, after a teaser that was shown at a convention somewhere) that it's kicking off the publicity for it.

The series stars Dominique Thorne, who first appeared in 2022's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as tech genius Riri Williams. Riri is an MIT student who ends up building her own suit of armor like Iron Man's, and ends up getting involved in some Wakanda problems before returning home.

Now, she's the star of her own series, in which she's back home in Chicago and gets wrapped up in a greater plot as she works to further her ambitions of creating another suit of armor. Here's the trailer:

When Marvel released Avengers: Endgame back in the summer of 2019, it put itself into an annoying corner. For more than a decade, it had built up this incredible run of superhero films and ironic characters: Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Chris Evans as Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, and so forth. Endgame marked a significant transitional point for the larger MCU: most of those actors were done with those roles after playing them for so long, but the studio juggernaut isn't anywhere close to stopping.

The solution? Bring those characters back, but differently, something that the comic books have been doing for ages. Over the last couple of years, we've been seeing something of a changing of the guard for a number of those characters: She Hulk: Attorney at Law introduced Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters / She-Hulk, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Captain America: Brave New World saw Anthony Mackie take on the helm of Captain America, Hawkeye brought in Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop, Ms. Marvel introduced us to Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever featured Thorne as Riri.

Marvel introduced the character in 2016's Invincible Iron Man Vol. 3 #7 by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mike Deodato and has appeared in a range of Iron Man-related comics since. In an interview that year, Bendis noted that "[I created her] with the idea that Tony [Stark] needs more supporting characters in his world" and that "She’s based on research that I’d done about some other things that I’d been interested in, young geniuses [and] kids from Chicago trying to make something of their lives when the streets are literally danger zones."

This series has been a long time coming: Marvel announced it way back in 2020 along alongside Secret Invasion (which came out in 2023) and Armor Wars (which was being reworked from a series into a film and seems to be on the back burner at the moment). Ryan Coogler, the director of both Black Panther films was brought in as an executive director in 2022, and production took place mostly in 2022, and ultimately wrapped last year.

Coogler appeared in a new featurette about the upcoming series, and he notes that Ironheart wasn't designed as a successor to Tony Stark in the comics, but was a friend and mentee who eventually developed her own identity as a hero, while the other producers note that this is echoed in the series: she's not taking on the role that Iron Man had in this world, but is forging her own path forward.

This series will mark the end of Marvel's fifth phase (which included Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, The Marvels, Deadpool & Wolverine, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, Secret Invasion, Loki, Echo, Agatha All Along, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and Daredevil: Born Again), and it'll debut with three episodes on June 24th, with the remaining three episodes dropping weekly. After that, Marvel will move into its 6th Phase in July with The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

I'm excited about the show: Iron Man has long been one of my favorite characters, and I do love me some power armor.