Ten years ago today, Marvel’s Luke Cage premiered on Netflix, introducing audiences to a bulletproof Black man patrolling the streets of Harlem. The series, which debuted its 13-episode first season on September 30, 2016, starred Mike Colter in the title role and was created by showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, a former music journalist turned television writer.
Luke Cage was the third series in Marvel and Netflix’s street-level superhero slate, following Daredevil and Jessica Jones, where Colter first appeared as the character before headlining his own show. The character himself dates back to 1972’s Hero for Hire, created during an era when Marvel was looking to tap into the popularity of blaxploitation cinema. Coker’s adaptation reimagined that origin for a contemporary Harlem, surrounding Colter with Mahershala Ali as Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes, Alfre Woodard as Mariah Dillard, Simone Missick as Misty Knight, Theo Rossi as Shades, and Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple.
The show also arrived at a specific cultural moment. Its release came two years after the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, as the Black Lives Matter movement was reshaping the national conversation around policing and Black bodies. A bulletproof Black man walking through Harlem became more than a comic book premise, it became an image audiences read against the world they were living in, whether or not the writers’ room intended every layer of that reading.
That reading wasn’t incidental. Coker has said the character’s signature hoodie, riddled with bullet holes he still walks away from, was designed with Trayvon Martin in mind. Colter addressed the choice directly in a 2016 interview with The Wall Street Journal, saying the show gave him “a chance to bring attention to that.” Coker, speaking to Newsweek about his own experience as a large Black man, said that in that body “it’s always about brawn, it’s about anger,” a dynamic the hoodie was built to push back against. What started as a wardrobe choice became one of the show’s most quoted images, a piece of clothing that had made a real teenager a suspect rewritten as a costume that made a fictional man a protector.
The show’s identity was rooted in hip-hop, not as a soundtrack choice but as a way of life. Composers Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad built a score blending classical, funk, jazz and hip-hop, pulling from Nas, Gang Starr, Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest to frame each episode like its own album. Younge described the approach to Billboard as an effort to make something “unapologetically Black,” with no filters, embodying the renaissance of Harlem. Harlem’s Paradise, the nightclub at the center of the series, doubled as a cultural stage where real artists like Faith Evans and Jidenna performed under a watchful portrait of Biggie, and Cage’s own apartment kept a poster of Miles Davis by the door. It was a series that treated Black music, history, and geography as the architecture of the story itself, not set dressing around it.
That same specificity extended to the women of the cast. Missick’s Misty Knight is widely credited as the first Black female superhero to headline a role in live-action television, a distinction Missick addressed directly in an interview with PEOPLE, describing her casting as playing “the first black female superhero” in Marvel’s screen history. Opposite her, Alfre Woodard’s Mariah Dillard grew into one of the show’s most fully realized characters, helped by a backstory the series invented for her, a matriarch named Mama Mabel, to explain how a Harlem councilwoman curdles into the season’s true threat. Between the two of them, the show built out a Harlem where its Black women weren’t accessories to Luke’s story but characters carrying just as much weight.
The show also marked Mahershala Ali’s introduction to the Marvel universe, a role that would set the stage for a promise never fully kept. Ali was cast as Blade at Comic-Con in 2019, three years after Cottonmouth, only for that film to collapse under years of delays before Marvel confirmed this year it was no longer moving forward. Marvel chief Kevin Feige addressed the film’s collapse on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, saying he felt like “a gigantic loser and a failure” over never getting the movie made. A decade later, Cottonmouth remains Ali’s only live-action Marvel role.
Netflix canceled Luke Cage after two seasons in October 2018, a week after axing Iron Fist, officially citing “creative differences” and an inability to agree on terms for a third season. Behind that language was a dispute over a proposed cut from 13 episodes to 10, playing out as Disney prepared its own streaming service and moved to reclaim its characters. Daredevil would later get revived on Disney+. Luke Cage, despite being the most culturally specific and inclusive of Marvel’s Netflix shows, has yet to.
Between Luke Cage’s unfinished ending and Blade’s decade of false starts, Ali has now lived through two high-profile examples of the same outcome, ambitious Black-led projects that got announced, celebrated, and then left unresolved.
A decade later, the conversation around Luke Cage isn’t really about whether it holds up, it’s about why the industry keeps failing to finish what it starts with its Black leads.