The 2025 TV schedule has some sterling offerings heading out to audiences in the months to come. One such effort is going to please Black Panther fans, as the upcoming Marvel spinoff series Eyes of Wakanda will show us heroes' adventures as they recover and protect stolen Wakandan technology across eras of the distant past. Oh, and apparently, a major Marvel hero we’ve seen before in live-action may be getting an official MCU reboot.
Tied to this year’s Annecy Animation Festival, Variety had a conversation with the Disney+ series’ creator/showrunner Todd Harris, who dug deeper into the upcoming anthology series than he has before. Set to debut on August 5th, Eyes of Wakanda is set to be a true blast from the past; which apparently has allowed Harris and his crew to work in this surprisingly Rand-y (or not) element:
There will be an Iron Fist in here, and not the Iron Fist you expect.
Now there's a name I haven't heard in years. In all fairness, reading that particular quote made me do a double take. It was only a few years ago that Netflix had its own live-action series focused on Iron Fist; albeit with an incarnation of the Danny Rand variant of the character, played by Finn Jones.
The series was controversial and not as well received by fans as its streaming siblings, one of the reasons being that Iron Fist rarely used his titular powers. Oh, and of course there was the move to cast what should be an Asian hero with a white actor.
Even with those problematic elements, you’d think that maybe those in charge at Marvel Studios would use this Eyes of Wakanda spin-off to somehow bring that continuity back into the fold of the MCU proper. We’ve seen that already happen through the own Disney+ subscription original Daredevil: Born Again, and its recent plot twists.
As the series has now seen the inclusion of Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and Krysten Ritter’s return as Jessica Jones, you'd think they'd want to keep The Defenders together. Maybe Danny Rand was Blipped, and came back without his powers? Somehow, I don't think it's going to be as simple as that sort of comic-friendly re-write.
The words “not the Iron Fist you’d expect” have me believing that Marvel Studios is finally taking the previous Iron Fist backlash to heart and revamping the role. With Eyes of Wakanda taking great care to stay true to the Wakandan culture, and in the light of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ Mandarin retcon, we could see the Marvel Multiverse finally setting up an Asian actor to take the role back, which feels like the logical thing to do.
Of course, that’s just me jumping a bit ahead of the game here, as the Multiverse Saga is still moving in ways mysterious to us all. For the time being, we’ll just have to keep waiting for Eyes of Wakanda to show us this new spin on an old classic. So don’t forget that this four-episode series will start airing, only on Disney+, on August 5th.
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