Iron Fist: How Season 1 Criticisms Impacted Season 2’s Direction
For Iron Fist Season 2, Marvel Television brought in some new blood. Showrunner Raven Metzner will replace Scott Buck for the Netflix series’ sophomore outing, and he hopes to put his own spin on the character. Asked if he took Season 1’s criticisms into consideration for the development of Season 2, Metzner explained his approach and promised it would be “an evolution.”
“I come from a slightly different place. I know I was not around for Season 1. I am new to the Marvel family, and I come from sort of a nerd-centric world where I’ve read a whole lot of comic books and I love the character, so what I got really excited about was the opportunity when I sat down with Marvel for the first time and sort of heard that this job was available was to tell an Iron Fist story that I wanted to tell,” Metzner explained at Comic-Con International in San Diego. “Of course, we leapt off from — and also, look, in between Season 1, there’s been The Defenders and also now there’s Luke Cage Season 2. I had the opportunity to tell the story I always wanted to tell. Yeah, we leapt off from the place where Defenders ended, but it really was a chance for me to do something I wanted to do since I was 12-years-old. It’s an evolution from Season 1.”
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“We’re very forward thinking guys!” star Finn Jones pitched in. “We see the task in hand, and we just commit to it. Where my head was at, I just wanted to come into Season 2 with 110% of my energy and just give the best version of Danny Rand to the show that I possibly could. My mind was just on the prize, and that was the only thing I was racing towards. Luckily, Raven came on board with the same kind of ethos. We were surrounded by a great group of people this season that have the same ethos in their head as well. I felt like it was a really productive and a really fun Season 2.”
The two recounted the first time they met: at last year’s SDCC. As chance would have it, Jones inadvertently ended up playing a game of Mortal Kombat with Metzner’s son. “So my son comes over and he’s like, ‘Oh, I was just playing Mortal Kombat with this dude. I just totally annihilated him! But he was really cool and so much fun. This party’s awesome!’ And then I look over, and I’m like, ‘Oh look! There’s Finn Jones!’ So I come over. I’m like, ‘Hey Finn! I’m Raven. This is my son Ryan.’ They’re both like, ‘We were just playing Mortal Kombat!’ So we started in kung fu in a weird way, and we started with a familial connection.”
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“We just chatted. We spent two hours just talking and talking,” he continued. “And then we ended up walking down the streets of San Diego, as I’m sure you guys will do when it’s sort of closing down and quieting down and we looked up and there was a big giant banner of the Defenders with Finn up there. I was like, ‘Whoa! Imagine if next year there’s an Iron Fist Season 2 banner up there! Wouldn’t that be awesome?’ And then we were like, ‘Yeah! We’re going to have to work really hard.’ And that was the moment we were like, ‘We’re just going to do this.'”
“It just felt right. You know when things just come together and it’s like, ‘Whoooa!’ It was like one of those moments and it was super exciting and ever since then it’s just been fun,” Jones added.
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“Along the way, the collaboration has just been with Finn and Jessica [Henwick] and Simone [Missick] and Alice [Eve] and all the directors that we brought this year and the new writers that we brought,” Metzner concluded. “It’s just been a really positive, positive, powerful experience.”
Arriving Sept. 7 on Netflix, Marvel’s Iron Fist Season 2 stars Finn Jones as Danny Rand, Jessica Henwick as Colleen Wing, Sacha Dhawan as Davos, Tom Pelphrey as Ward Meachum, Jessica Stroup as Joy Meachum, Simone Missick Misty Knight and introduces Alice Eve as Mary Walker.