Black Panther: Wakanda Forever already has a sequel of sorts lined up: Disney+’s upcoming Ironheart series, starring Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams.
There’s never been a franchise quite like the one that Marvel Studios has built over the past 14 years. What started as an interconnected lineup of feature films has expanded to include an ever-increasing number of Disney+ originals that, thanks to the expanded runtimes of television, are able to explore characters and concepts in brand new ways. Now the movies and TV shows inform each other, with one informing the other and vice versa, etc. That’s evidenced by Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a Marvel movie that just opened in theaters — and it already has a sequel of sorts on the way.
That sequel is Ironheart, a Disney+ television series centered around Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the brilliant MIT student who gets swept up in the brewing war between Wakanda and Talokan. So, who is Riri Williams, what’s her role in Wakanda Forever, and what’s in store for her when she becomes the lead character of her own show? Keep on reading for more information — and SPOILERS ahead.
Riri Williams is a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. She hails from Chicago, where she grew up working on cars with her dad — which sounds more cute than extraordinary until you learn that she was, like, three years old and tinkering around with an engine. Now that she’s at the premier school for tech and science studies, she spends her spare time working on her own Iron Man suit… and she makes a lot of money by doing homework for other students.
In the comics, Riri Williams was created by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato and introduced in 2016’s Invincible Iron Man #7. Her comic book past differs slightly from what we learn in Wakanda Forever; in the comics, Riri’s father died shortly after she was born and she was accepted into MIT at 11.
For a class project, Riri invented technology that could track vibranium — so of course the U.
