Is Scott Adkins Our Iron Fist?

As 2015 has dragged on one thing has become abundantly clear: Marvel Studio’s future in phase 3 is far less certain than anybody really expected.  More and more the little studio that could has turned into the big studio that can’t seem to get out of its own way.  Marvel’s phase 2 has had some major financial success certainly but culturally the studio has only gotten more scattershot and less solid at predicting what, among its many properties, will be a legitimate smash with audiences or just make a lot of money.  Sure Iron Man 3 was a major financial success but it’s not like anyone is genuinely interested in diving deeper into the Mandarin, AIM, or Extremis any time soon.  The same way Age of Ultron broke all kinds of records but spent the summer getting stomped on at the box office and in the popular consciousness by Jurassic World. 

Meanwhile, less studio involved projects like Ant-Man, Daredevil, Agent Carter, Jessica Jones, and chief of all Captain America: Winter Soldier have found major traction with audiences.  All of this has made Marvel’s upcoming “phase 3” a much shakier and more uncertain place for the once untouchable kings of pop culture.  That their films will still gross solid returns is without question but the lingering issue of “will people still be talking about Marvel in the year 2020” has only become more and more prevalent.  Turns out you can’t sustain cultural impact through cross genre-continuity alone but damned if they aren’t going to try because it looks like Marvel has decided to add another hero to Dr. Strange in the form of Scott Adkins as Iron Fist.

To be clear Marvel have not confirmed in any way that Scott Adkins will be playing Iron Fist, just that he’ll be in Dr. Strange in 2016 but honestly I’d be incredibly shocked if he didn’t turn out to be Marvel’s premiere martial arts hero.  Partly this is because Adkins is just an amazing martial artist, seriously one of the most talented fighters currently working in film today so the idea that they’d slip him into the Marvel universe yet keep him totally divorced from the one famous kung-fu hero of Marvel is a hard pill to swallow.  More than that, Marvel has been doing this kind of thing a lot lately, double stuffing their films with multiple heroes as a sort of hedged bet. 

They’re doubling down on the cross-genre continuity stuff as much as they can, probably because it’s what afforded them so much ink back when they started and a big chunk of Marvel’s cross-media pollination scheme is to structure films and shows around shout outs and Easter eggs to stimulate people looking up those references and then posting them online.  I freely admit, blogs like this one are basically just a cog in the ingenious Marvel marketing machine and it’s hard to say their doing something wrong when I’ve managed to get as many clicks as I have out of stories about the Hulk being in Thor: Ragnarok or what Marvel’s 2020 mystery films are. 

Aside from just falling into the Marvel trend of staving off stagnation by doing what they did before but to a greater degree it just makes sense to throw Dr. Strange and Iron Fist together.  Both characters origins are based around ancient, hidden locations in Tibet so it’d be a little weird to have them stomping around one another’s backyard without at least a token acknowledgement.  At the same time it’d just be much cheaper for Marvel to recycle the sets for Iron Fist rather than trying to split his show between a mystic hidden city and Hell’s Kitchen. 

Additionally, Iron Fist is one of the few big name magic heroes aside from Dr. Strange and I get the sense Marvel still isn’t exactly sure how to integrate magic into their universe yet.  We’ve had Thor and the Asgardians but they’ve always hammered in that they’re aliens with powers that our science can’t explain yet but still relying on some kind of scientific explanation.  At the same time Marvel have always been very ambivalent about adding additional mythologies to the Asgardians like Greco-Roman Gods or the Egyptian pantheon.  That hesitance is probably a big part of what’s left Dr. Strange and Iron Fist so far off the chopping block as both heroes rely on things Marvel seems thoroughly reticent to commit to so I get wanting to pair them up and give them a single movie to explore these elements rather than devoting a big chunk of a possible Netflix show to explaining how Iron Fist’s powers work and the mechanics of magic in the MCU. 

If Adkins is playing Iron Fist though I kind of doubt his origin will be directly transposed.  Some things will most likely remain like him being the son of a wealthy industrialist who stumbled upon the hidden realms K’un-Lun by accident but the big shift will probably involve the visual nature of K’un-Lun and the denominational origin of Iron Fist’s powers.  In the comics his origin is tied deeply into myth that may not be literally from Tibetan origin but it’s heavily modeled on it (at the time of his creation it was a lot harder to check these things,) none of which will probably make it to screen. 

Something we’ve all sort of agreed not to discuss with Dr. Strange is the major change to series main stay the Ancient One, Earth’s sorcerer supreme and the one who trains Dr. Strange in the mystic arts to be his successor.  In the comics the Ancient One is Tibetan but in the film Tilda Swinton will be playing that part, predominately because featuring a major Tibetan hero would mean the film wouldn’t sell very well in the Chinese market.  I’m not sure if that same calculating approach will impact Iron Fist’s mythos but if he suddenly shifted to a more non-denominational form of martial arts magic or was just learning to channel his “life force” into fighting I wouldn’t be all that surprised.

There’s also the looming question of The Defenders and how Iron Fist will fit into Marvel’s upcoming Netflix crossover series.  Based on statements from Jessica Jones show runner and creator Melissa Rosenberg Defenders is coming up so quickly that Marvel probably couldn’t slip a second season of Jessica Jones in even if they wanted to, which would suggest to me that Defenders will be gracing our screens sometime in 2017 considering that Luke Cage and Daredevil will both be getting additional Netflix seasons before its launch.  If there really isn’t scheduling room for more Jessica Jones prior to Defenders it’s kind of hard to believe that there’s room for a season of Iron Fist (if there was it’d have to push Defenders launch time to fall/winter 2017.) 

My guess is that Iron Fist will be introduced in Dr. Strange, probably following up on the super powered Asian gangster and the Hand ninjas from Daredevil.  The Hand are the perfect villains for Defenders, replete with henchmen and not requiring anymore definition or motive beyond “because evil” so what will most likely happen is that Iron Fist will enter into the Netflix corner of the Marvel universe through Defenders as the sole member of the team who knows what the deal is with the bad guys, basically filling the Thor role for the group. 

Dr. Strange is scheduled for release November 4, 2016


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