Dominique Thorne's Ironheart will debut in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever before going to Disney Plus
The Black Panther sequel will also feature Michaela Cole, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Daniel Kaluuya, Winston Duke, and Lupita Nyong’o
According to ComicBook.com, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige dropped a surprisingly big reveal in a surprisingly casual manner while promoting Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. He said the studio is currently filming Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever now, and in addition to some new and returning cast members we already knew about, the film will feature the debut of Dominique Thorne’s Riri Williams, a.k.a. the teenage superhero Ironheart.
Ironheart is getting her down Disney+ show at some point in the future, but Feige says this will be the first time we get to see her character before she goes off on her own adventure on the streaming service. He says she started shooting for Wakanda Forever this week, so (in theory) we might know a little bit more about the MCU version of Riri before too long. At the very least, we’ll get to see her next summer when the Black Panther sequel comes out. That also means the Ironheart show is at least a year off, but there are plenty of Disney+ Marvel shows to watch before then (Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Secret Invastion, and more we’re forgetting).
For those who don’t know Ironheart, she’s a relatively new addition to the Marvel canon (having only been introduced in Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato’s Invincible Iron Man in 2016). She’s a teenage genius who built her own Iron Man-like armor and briefly served as the replacement Iron Man when Tony Stark died (he got better), and she also had an AI replica of Tony Stark’s consciousness help her out for a while before the real guy came back. That probably won’t happen in the MCU, unless Robert Downey Jr. decides he wants to play a voice on a TV show, but weirder things have happened. (Also, Doctor Doom was another replacement Iron Man at this same time and his little run there was underrated, so if Marvel needs an excuse to get that metal bastard into the movies, this… would actually be a pretty bizarre way to do it.)