Watch Marvel’s Comic-Con Teasers for ‘Luke Cage,’ ‘Iron Fist,’ ‘The Defenders’
“I’m just getting started.”
That’s the stone-cold one-liner that street-smart crimefighter Luke Cage (Mike Colter) drops on a scummy New York crime boss in the newly unveiled teaser for the Luke Cage solo Netflix series, which will start streaming on September 30th. But those words might as well have been a rallying call for fans of Marvel‘s small-screen output who were attending San Diego Comic-Con.
Marvel Studios won’t unveil news on their film projects until later this week, but last night brought the Marvel Television panel and with it, a trio of teasers for gritty, Big Apple-set action properties. With Ol Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” as his fitting accompaniment, Mike Colter’s bulletproof superhero rips the door off a car and uses it as a shield while raiding what appears to be a gang stronghold. Like Daredevil and Jessica Jones (where the character first appeared), Luke Cage will take a darker, street-level approach to superheroes — Deadline quotes showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker as telling the crowd that “the world is ready for a bulletproof black man” and that “it’s got a Nineties vibe, but it’s very much of today.”
Next up was the preview for a new solo series starring martial arts master Danny Rand, a.k.a. the immortal Iron Fist. The teaser touches briefly on Rand’s unlikely origins — he’s taken in by kung fu monks after surviving a plane crash — before rejoining him, barefoot on the streets on New York and punching through walls. Finn Jones has stepped in to portray the frequent partner of Cage, the pair having worked together as the “Heroes for Hire” in the original comic books. Iron Fist is expected to be released sometime in 2017.
The third teaser shown at the Comic-Con panel advertised their televised Avengers equivalent — the crossover series The Defenders, which will pair all four of Netflix’s grittier superheroes in one show. The impressionistic clip shown at the panel harkens back to the group’s comic-book origins with its impressionistic visuals of ripping paper, which reveal little glimpses of the members’ symbols to the strains of Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are.’ The Defenders is also slated to come out sometime next year.
The bold, readily identifiable music choices are no coincidence, either; Coker made mention of the “Wu-Tangification of the Marvel universe” through the soundtrack cuts in Luke Cage, saying that he “wanted the 13 episodes to feel like an album.”