Marvel's Ironheart Stars Tease Bringing the MCU to Chicago

Dominique Thorne and Anthony Ramos preview the Windy City's MCU significance.

By Jenna Anderson

The Marvel Cinematic Universe will soon include Ironheart, a new Disney+ exclusive series revolving around Black Panther: Wakanda Forever's Riri Williams / Ironheart (Dominique Thorne). The series, which is expected to debut on Disney+ next year, just screened its latest footage at the 2024 D23 Expo, which showcased a bit of Riri's adventures as a superheroine and a young adult in her hometown of Chicago, Illinois. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Thorne and Parker Robbins / The Hood star Anthony Ramos teased the significance that Chicago has in the Ironheart series.

"It's an invitation to explore her roots and her upbringing," Thorne explained. "We're taking it back to her hometown of Chicago, and a bit of a battle ensues as she's debating between or considering how she wants to use what she realizes is a powerful wealth of knowledge, realizing just how much genius she has in her, deciding what she's going to do with that. We see that play out in the environment when she gets back home as well — she has these options. Who and how am I going to use these things that I now know about myself?"

"Parker Robbins in the comics is from New York, but being able to flip his story and making him from Chicago, we made him from Humboldt Park, which has, obviously, a large Puerto Rican population," Ramos revealed. "We created this whole backstory with his mom being from the Young Lords and raising him that way. Chicago plays a huge part in the identity of all of our characters and the identity of this show, so I'm really excited for people to experience that. It was just a gift to be able to shoot there. It's an amazing city, one of the greatest cities in the world."

What Is Ironheart About?

Ironheart stars Thorne as Riri Williams, a genius inventor who creates the most advanced suit of armor since Iron Man. Ironheart also stars Lyric Ross, Shea Couleé, Zoe Terakes, Alden Ehrenreich, Manny Montana, Shakira Barrera, and Harper Anthony cast in currently-unknown roles.

The Ironheart Disney+ series was first confirmed during 2020's Disney Investor Day presentation. Snowpiercer writer, playwright, poet, and educator Chinaka Hodge will be serving as the series' head writer, with Sam Bailey and Angela Barnes directing, and Ryan Coogler's Proximity among the producers on the series. Coogler, Hodge, Zinzi Coogler, and Sev Ohanian serve as executive producers alongside Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige, Louis D'Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Brad Winderbaum, and Zoie Nagelhout.

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Ironheart is expected to debut on Disney+ in 2025. If you haven't signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.

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