Robert Downey Jr, who plays Iron Man/ Tony Stark in Marvel Cinematic Universe, has responded to the decision of Marvel Comics to replace Tony Stark with an African -American 15-year-old prodigy Riri Williams.

The Avengers actor took to Twitter and shared the image featuring Williams with the Iron Man's armour to welcome his successor. He wrote, "Get ready for a new generation of Marvel BAMF..."

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Marvel Comics recently announced Riri Williams will soon take over the Iron Man mantle from Tony Stark in the pages of Invincible Iron Man at the end of Civil War II. Williams was first introduced in a subplot in Invincible Iron Man #6. She is described as a science genius who enrols in MIT at the age of 15, and catches Tony Stark's attention when she builds her own Iron Man suit in her dorm.

Previously, creator and Iron Man writer Brian Michael Bendis spoke to Time about the creation of Riri Williams. Speaking about the origin of the new female Iron Man, Bendis explained, "One of the things that stuck with me when I was working in Chicago a couple of years ago on a TV show that didn't end up airing was the amount of chaos and violence. And this story of this brilliant, young woman whose life was marred by tragedy that could have easily ended her life — just random street violence — and went off to college was very inspiring to me. I thought that was the most modern version of a superhero or superheroine story I had ever heard. And I sat with it for awhile until I had the right character and the right place."

Robert Downey Jr, Iron Man
Robert Downey Jr plays Iron Man in Marvel Cinematic universe Reuters, Marvel

"As we've been slowly and hopefully very organically adding all these new characters to the Marvel Universe, it just seemed that sort of violence inspiring a young hero to rise up and act, and using her science acumen, her natural-born abilities that are still raw but so ahead of where even Tony Stark was at that age, was very exciting to me," he told the magazine.