It’s been years since Netflixs Marvelshows were canceled, but affection for them still burns brightly. Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin have already made the jump to Disney Plus, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher will do the same in Daredevil: Born Again, and fans won’t stop cheerleading for Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones and Mike Colter’s Luke Cage to join them.
However, nobody is beating the drum for Finn Jones’ Iron Fist. This is universally considered one of the worst MCU-branded releases of all-time, and is notable for being a martial arts show with outright awful fight scenes (its deficiencies are obvious when stacked against stablemate Daredevil).
Now fans are working through one more post-mortem. Is the show bad because of Jones, or the writers?
Since the show’s cancellation, a lot of behind-the-scenes information has emerged. Jones arrived on set with little martial arts experience, and a highly compressed shooting schedule meant he had to learn on the job, a problem compounded by having little time to rehearse fight choreography.
There are two perspectives on this: Jones says that he wasn’t given enough preparation time for the role, while the stunt team argues he was too lazy to put in the effort. The truth is unknown, but whatever the reason, we got a show that failed to tap the action potential of Marvel’s fiercest fighter.
The top-voted comments blame showrunner Scott Buck, who cast the inexperienced Jones, decided the compressed shooting schedule, and failed to allocate time to choreograph the fights. As they say, the buck has to stop somewhere.
Maybe Marvel will eventually bring back Iron Fist, though we suspect Jones won’t be along for the ride.