Disney Delivers Another Debacle As 'Ironheart' Becomes Marvel's 'The Acolyte' – A Series Review

Disney+ has released another Marvel series - “Ironheart” - and it becomes not just another woke fiasco on the platform; this might be among the worst offerings seen from the studio. Not only is this worse in quality and amateurism than “She-Hulk,” it actually challenges “The Acolyte” as far as being about the most unwatchable content from the streamer. (We covered that monumental disaster extensively in 2024.)

So, just how bad is this new offering? The troubles are on display before you watch one scene. Behold the red flags in the show's genesis: It was written in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement; the cast is nearly all POC, so they altered most of the source materia; filming was completed in 2022 and is only now coming to light; the completed product went through double-digit amounts of edits; the studio only put out a trailer barely a month before the debut; and they burped out the entire series in about a week with two, 3-episode releases.

All of this indicates how Disney-Marvel realized it had a debacle on its hands and strained to deal with what they inspired. “Ironheart” stands as the last offering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase-5, and it has been a series of failures. “Deadpool and Wolverine” stands as about the lone success from this iteration of the MCU. As a sign of how bad things have been, the most successful of the Disney Plus-Marvel shows was “Agatha All Along.”

Marvel master Kevin Feige was allegedly recently heard describing some of the output seen from the streaming products in a painstaking light:

The head of Marvel Studios told colleagues recently that watching all the comic-book giant’s new TV shows and films had started to feel more like homework than entertainment.

This describes “Ironheart,” to be sure. Even as Disney head Bob Iger has declared they will be focusing more on quality of content rather than quantity, this thing gestated back when the studio was marinating in virtue activism; so, we get possibly the most woke-DEI-checkbox casting ever seen, all done in a bid to hire a cast and crew based on their labels as opposed to their talent and servicing the storyline. And it comes in with a cost of roughly $20 million per episode?! (Obligatory spoilers warning, although doubtful this is needed.)

The plot overview: This centers on a young and brilliant college woman who crafts her own Ironman-style super suit and ends up falling into allegiance with a criminal outfit as she wrestles with her own morality and identity. The reality: This is a villain origin story with a character who is both unlikeable and self-destructive, and makes repeatedly horrible choices supposedly done in service to woke empowerment.

let's hear it for the wide range of black characters in #Ironheart 🦾❤️‍🔥 pic.twitter.com/EIe8FzxCUn
— k. ♡ (@blkwatcher) July 2, 2025

Thus begins a backstory of a brilliant child prodigy, Riri Williams, who manages to land a full scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there she uses grants made to MIT to create her version of the Tony Stark weaponized suit, but she dumps on his accomplishment as something he was only able to do because he was a billionaire. This completely ignores the basis of that storyline, where he built his initial suit while held captive by terrorists in the Middle East. The show relies on the insistence (rather than displaying) of Riri’s brilliance and motivations; she tells the audience, “I can be the greatest inventor of my generation.” Later she tells the dean, “I want to build something undeniable. You want me to be small, but I refuse.”

Riri gets busted selling intelligence to other students and nearby colleges - dismissing the concept of getting a top-flight career with corporations - and upon her expulsion, she makes off with the suit, justifying that it was made with “her” grant money, not those made to the college. She manages to do this using the help of the built-in AI that is a ripoff of Microsoft’s Clippy -- this example instead being an animated anthropomorphic pencil. (Yes…seriously.)

She meets with a friend to mourn the loss of her father and best friend, Natalie, to a gang shooting. She tells him, “I need a job that pays. A lab so big they don’t notice if I finesse a resource here or there.” But instead of working at a place like Boston Dynamics, where she could become rather unrealistically wealthy, she falls in with a gang to make far less with her cut of the thieving and extortion. Riri needs a new AI for her new version of her suit, after crashing.

So, she hacks into the “Black Panther” Wakanda servers and, with her brain wired to her computer, she dozes off thinking of her friend; Natalie is reconfigured as Riri’s new AI assistant. She becomes N.A.T.A.L.I.E. which stands for Neuro-Autonomous Technical Assistant Laboratory Intelligence Entity. Yes…seriously.

Remember when everyone said to give Ironheart a chance and that Riri wouldn’t be as bad as she was in the comics?

Well, she gets expelled from MIT for selling test answers… then steals her Iron Man suit on the way out because she built it with grant money and thinks that means… pic.twitter.com/OZvvVJMIfG
— MasteroftheTDS (@MasteroftheTDS) June 27, 2025

The gang she connects with is led by Parker, known as The Hood, because he wears a hooded cape imbued with dark magic. His cohorts are a series of characters from the comics, but all are POC intersectional types, with a gender-fluid muscle duo and a hyper-flamboyant trans named Slug. Despite Parker-Hood being blatantly evil, it takes N.A.T.A.L.I.E. to explain to the brilliant Riri that something is off about the guy. So, during one heist Riri secretly removes a small patch of his cloak with a laser.

She also meets with the son of “Ironman” heavy Obediah Stane, and I had to laugh every time he was referred to as Zeke Stane. He is played by Alden Ehrenreich, who was the titular lead in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” in case you were wondering why you are unfamiliar with him. In one moment, Riri recoils at the remains ashes of "Zeke"s father Obediah, which he keeps in a Zip-Loc baggie because, “We weren’t close.” Yes…seriously.

This is the halfway point and we have seen - after Riri agrees to join this gang because they do not harm anyone - this group has murdered dozens of corporation employees, security guards, and the CEO of one business because he wanted to improve food supply techniques to feed the world, but impacted small farmers. So, we have a series justifying the actions of its main character and then defying those very standards almost immediately.

After this point, many online thought Riri would have a redemption story and become heroic, but it is not to pass. She is to become a villain, and not a likable one, at all. When selling the audience an anti-hero, you should give us a reason to either root for, or comprehend the motivations of, or at the very least understand their descent into villainy. Instead, we only get a self-centered character who justifies her acts because of her racial station in life. Repeatedly, she asks others if she is a good person, and even Zeke Stane (heh) tells her flat out she is a selfish opportunist who steps on others, after he gets jailed for one heist when she leaves clues behind.

Marvel really just pulled a Wandavision. Gave us a character who is truly evil and selfish but STILL gets praised at every turn and doesn’t have to be responsible for their actions. I can’t believe Ironheart is a real show man and people actually like it pic.twitter.com/CFqRWENDPC
— Kaida 🌊 (@khaliltooshort) July 2, 2025

From here, the show lurches from obtuse to interminable. Parker-Hood realizes Riri had one member die at a heist, and he springs Zeke Stane from jail and makes him quasi-bionic. Riri takes the patch from Parker-Hood’s cape to a local hippie witch who can move to other dimensions, and she learns the cape is from the dark realms. There is also some melodrama when the former boyfriend of Natalie encounters AI N.A.T.A.L.I.E. and is understandably bothered, suggesting she be deleted. N.A.T.A.L.I.E. is bothered, and the AI leaves in a dose of “you can’t fire me, I quit!” Yes…seriously.

The gang sets out to get Riri, and this is where things go obliviously hilarious. White Castle ponies up big dollars to have lengthy scenes shot in a location, but who thought it was a good idea to have a group of POC women seen breaking out in a fight inside of a restaurant, with all the videos of this very thing seen on social media?! Anyway, Riri fends them off, but then has to contend with the improved Zeke Stane. He gets the better of her but instead of killing her, tells her to scoot from the city; her suit is ruined. But since this is the “M-She-U,” we had to have an obligatory fight with a woman hitting a guy in the grapes, because Girl Power.

Now, things turn just purely stupid. Riri needs to build a new suit for a final battle and she manages to do so by going to her father’s former garage. We are expected to believe that with no money, using only mechanics tools and a 1971 Plymouth Barracuda, she manages to craft a suit even better than the one she made at MIT with unlimited funding. She no longer has AI to power the suit, so they rely on magic instead, using the swatch from Parker-Hood’s cape.

This time, she defeats Zeke because he allows her to, and this frees him from control of Parker-Hood, somehow. Riri then defeats Parker by removing his hood, and things culminate with her meeting with the ultimate villain, Mephisto. He strikes a deal with her where he brings Natalie back to life, and as the girls embrace, we see Riri’s arm displaying evil veins. And we are supposed to care, somehow.

This is such a mess that the unintentional laugh-lines are seen throughout. A lead character wants money and power, but foregoes her obvious lucrative career path for a life of petty crime. In order to hail POC power, they need to culturally appropriate numerous comic characters. We see Zeke become transformed by the trans character. Riri is shown smarter than Tony Stark, but while hiding at a secret location, she orders delivery from Uber Eats. In a show supposedly proudly boasting POC pride, they have their gang of the “Social-Justice League” fighting it out in an eatery like a Waffle House viral video.

Disney needs to be shamed for this mess as it is so obviously poor in quality, it could not even manage “The Disney Woke Cycle” – Push woke content/Preemptively defend the criticism not taking place/ Tell those (not)criticizing they should not watch/Then call the failure due to the intolerance.

From the trailer release to the conclusion, this came out so rapidly that there was no time for the usual spin cycle. The series wrapped up WHILE the accusations were still taking place, and by then, the public saw this show was what one school administrator told Riri at the start: “That’s a hot pallet of garbage!”

The only redeeming aspect is that this wraps up this MCU segment, and better times can be attempted. Maybe now Kevin Feige and Bob Iger will look ahead, and maybe they can ret-con this entire Phase-5 fiasco, instead of the way they have treated the audience. (Warning, video contains coarse gesture.)