What’s interesting about these reviews is how many of them tell a similar story: Iron Fist is really badly whitewashy/chi-splainy, but it’s also poorly scripted (spending way too much time on the corporate intrigue of Rand Industries), poorly acted by its lead, and (arguably most damning) the fight sequences are boring.
And that’s the surprising part – anyone who’d been paying attention to social media and the press circuit could have told you that the show had walked into a buzz-saw of negative press and fan backlash, in an almost complete inverse of what happened with Luke Cage. But the idea that Marvel would drop the ball on even the minimum requirements of producing a martial arts show is astonishing – and I can’t wait to read the behind-the-scenes accounts to explain how that happened. Lack of care/investment in the project? Just box-ticking its way to Defenders and Power Man/Iron Fist? Inquiring minds want to know.
However, I’m not really coming at this from a place of just gloating, because I have a certain fondness for Iron Fist (more Power Man and Iron Fist) and I think this project could have really worked with a few changes, changes that seem pretty obvious to me but seem to have passed by the creative team entirely.
1. Make Iron Fist Asian-American.
I’m just one in a long long line of people who’ve been saying this in the direction of Marvel’s increasingly-deaf ears since this project got off the ground. It solves a LOT of Marvel’s representation problems quite easily: the “white savior” morass they jumped into with Doctor Strange goes away, you can still do the K’un Lun fish-out-of-water by emphasizing the assimilated-clueless-Wall Street-dude thing (more on this in a bit), and if the worry was that leaning into stereotype would be bad, well now we have two data points demonstrating that the opposite is much worse.
But thinking of Overwatch’s approach to diversity here for a second, the main creative reason to have done so is that it expands directions for storytelling in important ways. With Daredevil already there, the writers already had a problem that they were creating a martial-arts-superhero show in a world in which they’d be judged against the one they’d already created. Thus, right off the bat, rather than telling the story of another brooding white dude, you’re telling a different kind of story and you’ve opened up all kinds of new stories that you can tell about how Danny Rand relates to his family, to the revelation of K’un Lun, to martial arts, etc. etc.
2. Make Iron Fist a Martial Arts Comedy.
Here’s the thing about Iron Fist: he’s kind of a silly character. I mean, this is a dude who decided to go into superheroing by putting on not just spandex, but deep-V, popped collar, capris-and-slippers, and a Dread Pirate Roberts mask. And while Marvel has occasionally tried to remake Iron Fist into a grim badass, he almost always reverts (especially when he’s around Luke Cage, and that’s important) into being a slightly goofy, hot-tempered, motormouth. More Michelangelo than Raphael, definitely not a Leonardo.
And that’s great – because it’s a great way to distinguish your show from the brooding Catholic angst of Daredevil. If you’ve already got a martial arts show that’s distinctive for being dark and angsty, the best way to make your new show stand out is to have it be colorful and funny. It also works, and this part is crucial, better for the sake of the larger Netflix Marvel project: in both Defenders and Luke Cage/Iron Fist, you want diversity of personalities so that the writers and actors have something to work off of rather than an angst-off.
So clearly what needed to happen on Iron Fist is that the creative team needed to be led and consist of people with a deep and abiding passion for not just classic martial arts movies, but specifically martial arts comedies, because there’s an entire genre out there waiting to be borrowed from and played with in ways that could actually deal with some of the critiques people have been having of the Marvel Netflix shows. Are people bored of the Hand? Lean into the ninja jokes by throwing ever-more-ninjas at Danny Rand until it turns into the rake jag, have Danny lampshade the whole situation (here’s where having him be the fish-out-of-water Wall Street dude works in your favor). Are people not liking the corporate intrigue? Shoot the boardroom scenes as ott as action scenes, or have them do a MISSING REEL joke every time someone actually explains what’s going on.
And in addition to an AA actor, AA showrunners and writers but that’s none of my business.
Absolutely. Jessica Jones wouldn’t have been the show it was if Melissa Rosenberg wasn’t the showrunner and the writers’ room wasn’t well-balanced on gender lines; Luke Cage wouldn’t have been the show it was if the showrunner wasn’t Cheo Hodari Coker and the writers’ room wasn’t majority black.
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