Marvel's Iron Fist

Fraction and Brubaker's run on Immortal Iron Fist was very much influenced by Two-Fisted Tales — and I would have loved if they included that influence in the show (had we gotten a third season).

If/when they bring Iron Fist back, I wonder if they will keep the storyline going — after all, the Orsan Randall / Seven Capital Cities of Heaven story is one of his most popular — or if they will try to retell his origin (which would be pretty silly).

Iron Fist and Luke Cage are back.

All it says is that the rights will revert back to marvel in october.

A little late to have Danny appear in Shang Chi with a retconned actor.

I see this:

Sounds like it had potential, it's so sad to see that it looks like everyone involved with Marvel Netflix was completely blindsided by the cancellations.

I'll admit that Jones's remark about how season 3 was going to be "about Danny finally assuming the role of the Iron Fist, fully accomplished, fully charged up, and fully in control of his shit" makes me scratch my head, though. I find it frustrating when superhero shows dick around and wait to get a character into the role that everyone expects to see. There's such thing as build-up and pacing but if your superhero story isn't establishing the grounds for the character as most people know and expect to see them relatively quickly, as in within the first season of your show, you're doing something wrong.

So many of these comic book shows do the thing where it takes a whole season for a character to even start looking like people want to see them. Other shows take multiple seasons to get a characterization that feels like the character being adapted. And it didn't help in Iron Fist season 2 that they benched Danny for the better part of 60% of the season and gave the Iron Fist to Colleen.

This isn't even something unique to Iron Fist. All 3 seasons of the Punisher's appearances, for instance, rehash the same story of him becoming the Punisher (and with diminishing returns of his "Punisher"ness). At times these shows could really feel stuck in that attitude of being afraid to acknowledge the fact that it's a comic book show, or actually do something with the source material.

Daredevil was largely able to avoid this, or at the very least, when it did it, it did so in a way that felt worthwhile. However, it still had a mistake on a similar wavelength with being obsessed with Matt's black costume and having it be too prominent in Season 3, likely because casual fans liked it so much and blamed Season 2's missteps on "Superhero stuff and ninjas". But least it still very much felt like Matt's characterization and identity were consistent.^note And I think returning to the black suit for season 3 was also partially motivated by the fact that the suit was overpowered; so they had to take it off Matt to make it so Dex would be an actual threat to him. Because the way they wrote the defense/durability of the suit in the first two seasons would kind of make Dex really struggle (or really have to defy logic) to hurt him if Matt had it on. That said, if there's one thing I would've changed on this, it would've been for Matt to put the red Daredevil suit back on for the final moments of the season. After he calls Dex and turns him against Fisk, he should have gone to get the extra suit Melvin had at his shop, resulting in the final fight being Fisk against two Daredevils, maybe even with Matt wearing the black mask (even if just to distinguish him from Dex) in the fight and taking Dex's mask when it's over. In what we actually got, Matt goes through the motions of repairing his identity as Daredevil (which is why Brett says "He's not Daredevil, that is." pointing to Matt leaving Fisk's penthouse), but Matt doesn't actually visually become Daredevil again. It makes the final shot of him perched on a rooftop overlooking the city totally fall flat. At the very least he could've been back in the suit for that. Whereas Iron Fist and The Punisher feel like unintentional identity crises.

Even shows outside of Marvel make this weird mistake though. Arrow was a fucking nightmare when it came to this. They already lampshaded the superhero name in season 1 with Oliver Queen calling it lame after the villain suggests it. Probably the worst (best?) example is that the city was named "Starling City" until season 4 where a plotline included the name being changed to the comic accurate "Star City", and I don't think I need to explain how ridiculous every aspect of that is.

Yeah, I'm still sad too. Sure, Season 1 wasn't very good, but Season 2 was a huge improvement, and they laid such a great groundwork for Season 3.

Still hope for some kind of revival in the far future.

Finn Jones in particular got too much hate he didn't deserve, he wasn't responsible for the writing.

Out of all the Netflix shows that got cancelled, this is the one that stung the most. As Jones says, they had just turned the show around from its shaky first season and were climbing high, finally earned the audience's investment, and then to get suddenly cancelled right then and there after setting up so much intrigue for later seasons just blew it all up.

Luke Cage is a very close second. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Punisher at least got some form of closure, Bullseye cliffhanger aside.

I feel like runaways was the worst offender. They were so afraid of the fantasy aspect, that they tried to do the Magic from Technology thing. It took until season three for them to embrace it. At least we got one season of what the show should have been from the beginning.

It bothered me how they nerfed Bride of Nine Spiders though.

She's one of the Immortal Weapon's, an equal to Iron Fist and she got downgraded to mook-status.

Also, isn't she a good guy in the comics?

I wonder if this might have been better off as an animated series.

The producers at Netflix wanted to do gritty, down to Earth, street, and socially relevant. You could tell that the idea of a white martial arts master billionaire pissed them off.

So they ignored the fact that Danny is culturally Chinese and made him a dorky white guy Idiot Hero.

Yeah she's a creepy good character. Like she's weird and scary but she does join Danny's Immortal Weapon's after banding together to save their cities.

I swear reading The Immortal Iron Fist (with is a GOAT comic) makes me totally pissed off how they did Danny so dirty.

You can't just make everything grim and gritty, it doesn't work for every series.

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 12th 2021 at 4:08:25 AM

A series that took inspiration from wuxia and is about mystic martial arts from hidden ancient cities. And they want to make it into a gritty corporate drama, great job right there

Edited by jun_kagami on Feb 12th 2021 at 7:01:12 PM

Thanks Scott Buck.

With the Defenders back in play, I do kind of want to see Rand interact with Shang Chi.

I mean crossing martial arts wuxia with gritty corporate drama could work and be an interesting juxtaposition.

Season 1 just didn't do it right, and Season 2 decided to drop the latter element almost entirely.