Has anyone ever loved Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film Oldboy more than Marvel’s Kevin Feige and the rest of the executives overseeing the studio’s Netflix series? At New York Comic Con over the weekend, Netflix and Marvel released the teaser for their upcoming Iron Fist series. (Per IMDb, Iron Fist has a “mystical force known as the Iron Fist,” and is not to be confused with Iron Man, who is a man with a suit made out of iron, but is not himself made out of iron. To clarify further, Iron Man doesn’t iron his iron Iron Man suit, but Iron Fist may iron his Iron Fist, or iron Iron Man’s iron suit, or iron neither his Iron Fist nor Iron Man’s iron Iron Man suit. We’ll know more when the series is released.) Anyway, like Daredevil and Luke Cage before it, it looks like Iron Fist will have a scene where Iron Fist faces off against a wave of henchmen in a narrow hallway. (Jessica Jones had to settle for a barroom brawl.) For variation’s sake, in Iron Fist the henchmen are wielding hatchets, and the tracking shot will be an overhead view:
Netflix
The hallway fight in Oldboy is famous for a reason—and that reason is at least partially that it lifts from the language of video games—but Spike Lee remade the entire movie and only restaged that scene once. There’s no reason Netflix has to keep returning to it over and over again. Besides the Marvel promise of more of the same, the teaser gives us a look at Finn Jones, Jessica Henwick, and Jessica Stroup in character as Iron Fist, Coleen Wing, and Joy Meachum, respectively. Meanwhile, Park Chan-wook has gone on to make many films that don’t lean on the conceit of people fighting in a hallway, including this year’s The Handmaiden, opening Oct. 21. If you know what you like and what you like is people fighting in hallways, however, Iron Fist comes out on March 17, 2017.
