We took a frame by frame look at Marvel's Iron Fist trailer and found all kinds of cool stuff.
As is their annual tradition, Marvel dropped a trailer for their next Netflix series at New York Comic Con. This year, it's Iron Fist, a story about an orphan trained in martial arts in a hidden city who returns to fight crime in New York City and be besties with Luke Cage.
Watch it here in case you missed it...
As is the case with all of these trailers, this one was outstanding, and we dug through it and found some cool surprises. Let's go to the tape:
The trailer opens with a shot of Danny meditating in his fancy apartment, presumably in the penthouse of Rand Tower. If I recall correctly, it's supposed to be somewhere on 57th street, Midtown-ey but close enough to the Kitchen where he's plausibly able to pose as Daredevil one time.
The trailer is almost certainly narrated by Lei Kung the Thunderer, the man who trained Danny to become the Iron Fist. He's warning Danny to be on guard for enemies, saying that some will be "disguised as friend[s]" as the screen flashes past these two: the Meachum siblings, Ward and Joy (played by Tom Pelphrey and Jessica Stroup) who in the show's description are said to be running Rand Industries in the absence of any actual Rands.
Next he warns of enemies "slipping past as a stranger" as we see Jessica Henwick's Colleen Wing and Jessica Henwick's Collen Wing's sword stroll through.
And then we see the back of what is almost certainly Harold Meachum's head. In the comics, Harold was "friends" with Danny's father, who pushed Danny's father off a cliff so he could get with Danny's mom. More on this in a minute.
Madam Gao is back! Going to have much more on her in a second, but you will likely remember her from Daredevilwhere she was selling Steel Serpent-branded heroin, then telling Matt what the Hand was.
When Lei Kung is finished talking about how many enemies Danny will have, we smash cut through most of his life - we see him training, him being a shaggy-bearded businessman, and we see him lying in an airplane seat in the snow. That's a significant tweak to his origin from what I know it as. In the comics (specifically the magnificent Brubaker-Fraction-Aja book), Danny ends up at K'un-Lun because his Dad became obsessed with finding the place after serving as the boy-adventurer-sidekick to Orson Randall, Danny's predecessor as Iron Fist. If this is mostly accurate, it looks like Danny might find K'un-Lun because his plane went tits up over some mountains, making what we'll talk about later EVEN MORE frustrating.
When you really want to make a Stranger's Hand/Stranger Thingsjoke but it just won't work so you settle for an Arthurmeme.
Seriously, this is Danny showing off his Iron Fist power, where he channels the chi of Shou Lou through his hands to sometimes heal things but usually punch the shit out of them.
HA HA! SUCK IT, DOOR!
Now is as good a time as any to address the only turd in this punchbowl. Look, I get that Finn Jones is a good actor, but this show had the potential to be special, except for the iceberg that is the history of white savior bullshit in kung fu media that Iron Fistseemed to not care about before it ran headfirst into it. I'm sure this show is going to be as good as the rest of the Netflix Marvel shows, but when you cast a white guy as the savior of an Asian culture, have him rescue a white lady from a bunch of Asian bad guys, and have an Asian VO talk about how he's the savior...you're not even being delicate about it.
That said, this is a pretty sweet Reverse Oldboy.
Remember how I was grumpy before? Well, putting the Bride of Nine Spiders in this show helps. The Bride is one of the champions of one of the Seven Capital Cities of Heaven (of which K'un-Lun is one). She kicks the bejeezus out of people and occasionally uses martial arts moves to shoot a bunch of spiders on them, and with her other champions of the immortal cities of heaven, comprised one of the coolest teams in comics. I will stop being mad if I get a Fat Cobra spinoff show. I will stop being mad if I get a half an episode team up with Fat Cobra.
Madam Gao is widely rumored to be Crane Mother, the head of K'un-Zi, the dark reflection of K'un-Lun and home to the Steel Serpent, a classic Iron Fist villain.
Last shot of the trailer is of Danny's tattoo, the dragon Shou-Lou's sigil on his chest marking him as the Iron Fist.
What did you think of the trailer? Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments!