With Ironheart having minimal promotion and a questionable release strategy, Marvel Studios’ treatment of its Black, female-led superhero series once again raises an uncomfortable question: is the studio setting up minority-led stories to fail?
Ironheart is set to debut on Disney+ on June 24th. But unless you’re already a die-hard Marvel fan, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that.
Despite being executive produced by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler — fresh off the success of his latest horror film Sinners — and starring Wakanda Forever breakout Dominique Thorne, Ironheart has slipped beneath Marvel’s typically relentless marketing radar. There’s been no press tour, no merchandise roll-out, and no social media frenzy. For a studio known for sometimes teasing projects years in advance, the silence is deafening.
Created in 2016 by Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mike Deodato, Riri Williams is a 15-year-old Black girl from Chicago who reverse-engineers her own Iron Man suit while studying at MIT. Before joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and being dubbed Iron Man’s successor, she was simply another comic book character mentored by Tony Stark. As the comic series Invincible Iron Man #9 (2016) highlights, she is anything but a replacement. She’s a character brimming with relevance, ingenuity and representation, who packs a punch as mighty as some of our favourite Avengers.
On screen, however, Marvel seems hesitant to treat her as such.
Quantify the silence
Let’s look at the numbers.
The trailer for Marvel’s Agatha All Along first debuted on 11th March 2024, despite the show not airing until October of the same year. This trailer was followed swiftly with Marvel’s signature press tour and tie-in merchandise campaign, before releasing on Disney+ in weekly instalments. Charlie Cox’s grand return to the MCU as Daredevil trended on X (formerly Twitter) for over 36 hours after it’s title announcement. Daredevil: Born Again was also heavily featured in Disney’s 2024 upfronts despite undergoing reshoots and delays ahead of its 2025 release.
In contrast, Ironheart’s first trailer was released on May 14th — barely a month before the show airs. Even more bizarrely, it dropped on the same day as DC’s new Superman trailer, splitting audience attention. Perhaps most telling is the decision to release the first three episodes of Ironheart simultaneously. This is a tactic usually reserved for ‘niche’ shows with uncertain audience engagement; the series equivalent of a pre-emptive burial.
If this feels familiar, it’s because it is.
Marvel’s track record with shows fronted by characters of colour is, quite frankly, riddled with dismissal. Ms. Marvel — a later critically acclaimed series starring Pakistani-American teen Kamala Khan — was quietly dumped onto Disney+ all the way back in 2022. Echo, led by Alaqua Cox as Marvel’s first deaf, Native American antihero, suffered a similar fate: a multi-episode drop with little promotion across Disney+ and Hulu.
Both were later declared “underperforming” despite excellent reviews, with no acknowledgement of how a lack of promotion undermined their visibility and cultural impact.
As media scholar Kristen Warner outlines, this dynamic reflects the “burden of representation”, when shows led by marginalised characters are expected to prove the value of diversity, even when given minimal support. “When a Black-led show fails,” she writes in The Cultural Politics of Colourblind TV, “it doesn’t just fail… it gets used as evidence against future programming.”
Manufactured failures and strategic scapegoating
So why is Marvel doing this?
By quietly sidelining shows like Ironheart, Marvel creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Studio executives point to low viewership and declare that shows centring POC and gender-diverse casts aren’t what audiences want. It becomes the perfect excuse to revert to the comfort zone of white, male-centric storytelling.
As scholar Sarita Malik notes in her work on race and media, marginalised characters are frequently “used to symbolically represent progress, but are given insufficient support to succeed. When they inevitably underperform, it becomes a rationalisation for the status quo.” Rather than holding studios accountable for setting these productions up to fail, the blame is subtly shifted onto the characters themselves, often POC and women.
Marvel — and Disney more broadly — are quick to champion diversity when it aligns with financial or promotional gain. Films like Wakanda Forever, Shang-Chi, and Eternals offer fleeting moments of visibility for marginalised voices, only to fade into the background as the Marvel Cinematic Universe marches on. It’s a cycle of performative allyship, where characters of colour are treated as fashionable tokens rather than long-term priorities.
As The New Feminist has long argued, authentic representation demands more than visibility. It requires that marginalised creators are given not just a seat at the table, but the tools and support to thrive. Riri Williams, the protagonist of Ironheart, embodies everything Hollywood claims to celebrate: she is young, gifted, complex, and Black. So why is she being treated as disposable?
What message does this send to the Black girls watching who see themselves in Riri? What does it say when her story is quietly shelved before it has a chance to unfold?
There is still time for Marvel to pivot. They can amplify Ironheart, generate the buzz it deserves, and treat this series like the cultural milestone it should be. But that window is closing fast.
Until then, it’s up to us.
Support Ironheart. Watch it. Talk about it. Share it. Review it. Engage with it. Show Marvel and the wider industry that stories like Riri Williams’ matter. That we see through the scapegoating and that we’re demanding more.
