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

https://redstate.com/bradslager/2025/07/06/disney-delivers-another-
debacle-as-ironheart-becomes-marvels-the-acolyte-a-series-review-n2191308

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.

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.

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.


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.)


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama 
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.