New Ironheart Footage Reveals Iron Man Callback

Target has everything, doesn’t it? Where else can you buy tube socks, motor oil, and a Frog-Man (or is it Leap Frog?) action figure at the same time? Well, yes, lots of places, but if a new Target ad is to be believed, the retailer also carries stuff that Marvel’s newest tech genius needs to build her own suit of armor.

“Wakanda changed things, forever,” Williams (Dominique Thorne) says at the start of the commercial, as we see images of ships flying over the capital of the fictional nation. The commercial then cuts to a less fantastical location, Boston, where Williams is tinkering in her workshop. As Williams asks the viewer “So how will you share your brilliance with the world,” the commercial intercuts images of a young girl engineering something with her friends.

Realizing that something is missing, that girl decides to go to Target to sketch, where she just so happens to run into Williams getting tools (because she may have a Tony Stark-sized intellect, but she doesn’t have a Tony Stark-sized bank account). After taking a look at the girl’s drawings and offering some encouragement, Williams heads back home to fire up her armor. “After all, you never know where you’ll find inspiration,” Williams says, which seems to say that it doesn’t matter where you shop, so there’s no sense in scorching your retinas with Target’s red and white aesthetic.

Of course, the valuable part of the commercial involves Williams working the Ironheart armor. While a few toys for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and set photos from the Ironheart Disney+ series have given us an idea of what to expect from the MCU’s newest armor-based hero, this is the first time we’ve seen it in live-action. With a familiar high-pitched whirr, the arc reactor clicks on, and a blue glow illuminates the smile on Williams’s face. But the best part comes at the end when Williams tests the pulse receptor on her gauntlet. She turns to the side and fires the weapon, the concussive blast knocking her backward off-screen. “Let’s goooo!” we hear her shout with enthusiasm.

The final moment is a call back to one of the best sequences in the first MCU movie, Iron Man. Early in the movie, Tony Stark records himself testing his thruster boots, talking through his process to his robot assistants. After a three-second countdown, Stark fires the thrusters and launches backward, slamming against his lab’s concrete ceiling and falling to the ground, where he’s doused with fire repellant by one of his robots.

Now, before you go complaining into the comments about how Marvel is disrespecting the legacy of Tony Stark by showing a teenager have a far more successful test than that of a genius billionaire adult with a penchant for rock and roll tees, keep in mind the message of the commercial. Clearly, Tony did not get his tools from Target, and his body paid the price. True geniuses know that the best tools come from the same place I bought fabric softener and a water bottle just this morning.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever releases in theaters on November 11. Ironheart comes to Disney+ in 2023.