With its slate of television shows for Disney+ well underway, Marvel has been steadily working on its next phase of programs for the platform, and it looks as though its upcoming series Ironheart is about to begin preproduction: According to Variety, the studio has tapped Chinaka Hodge as the head writer for the series.
Hodge is a poet, educator, and screenwriter who’s published two poetry collections—For Girls with Hips: Collected Poems and Writings and Dated Emcees—and has worked as a story editor and staff writer for Apple’s Amazing Stories and TNT’s Snowpiercer. Additionally, The Hollywood Reporter noted that the studio will open a writer’s room for the project in May, and that the series will run for six episodes. Hodge got the job, THR says, after pitching her vision for all six episodes.
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The series has already cast its lead: Dominique Thorne (If Beale Street Could Talk, Judas and the Black Messiah) to play Riri Williams, a teenage inventor who constructed her own suit of Iron Man armor in her M.I.T. dorm room.
Disney announced the series back in December along with Secret Invasion and Armor Wars, three new shows that will follow the upcoming slate of live-action shows set to appear on the streaming service in the coming year—Loki, Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Moon Knight.
The streaming service has already debuted WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, both of which appear to be teeing up the next phase of films: The events in WandaVision are apparently closely tied to the upcoming Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (and presumably Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is reportedly pulling in characters from the other Spider-Man films), while Falcon and the Winter Soldier appears to be a precursor to Captain America 4. If Marvel is using its streaming shows to set up its upcoming films, it feels likely that Ironheart will be an ideal way to continue the Iron Man franchise forward without Robert Downey Jr., whose character Tony Stark perished at the end of Avengers: Endgame.
There’s no release date attached to Ironheart just yet, but it seems likely that with a writer’s room warming up in the next month, it’ll be hitting production soon.
