Marvel’s Ironheart Has Found A Head Writer, Hires Chinaka Hodge for the Disney+ Series

Chinaka Hodge, who has writing credits on Apple’s revival of Amazing Stories and the TV adaptation of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, will oversee the Disney+ comic book series, which tells the story of Riri Williams, a teenaged tech genius who reverse engineered an old Iron Man suit and essentially replaced Tony Stark after he stepped away from that role in the comics.

Information Getting Out Rarely!

When Disney and Marvel officially announced that an Ironheart series was in the works, they called it an “original series about the creator of the most advanced suit of armor since Iron Man.” We knew that the title role would be played by Dominique Thomas, who has gone an impressive two-for-two with her short list of credits so far (she has only appeared in If Beale Street Could Talk and Judas and the Black Messiah). But until today, that’s all the information we had about this series.

Chinaka Hodge, who has writing credits on Apple’s revival of Amazing Stories and the TV adaptation of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, will oversee the Disney+ comic book series, which tells the story of Riri Williams, a teenaged tech genius who reverse engineered an old Iron Man suit and essentially replaced Tony Stark after he stepped away from that role in the comics.

What Brain Said!

Kevin Feige, Marvel’s chief creative officer and the mastermind behind the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, is executive producing the show, as he does for everything Marvel-related.

“This story of this brilliant, young woman whose life was marred by tragedy that could have easily ended her life—just random street violence—and went off to college was very inspiring to me,” writer Brian Michael Bendis once said about creating the Riri Williams character for the pages of Marvel Comics. “I thought that was the most modern version of a superhero or superheroine story I had ever heard. And I sat with it for awhile until I had the right character and the right place.”

Hodge, Though Was Paired Up Previously

Hodge previously teamed with two future Marvel directors, Black Panther‘s Ryan Coogler, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings‘ Destin Daniel Cretton, to develop Minors, a series partially informed by her time as a teacher working with underserved youth. 

She joins a Marvel Cinematic Universe that appears more poised than ever to tackle social issues following Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which under head writer Malcolm Spellman, explored what it meant for a Black man to become Captain America. Spellman estimated that his writers room was 90 percent Black. According to sources, Ironheart may include a strong contingent of writers of color, as well.