Things are shaking up at Marvel. Kevin Feige and company are playing an Uno Reverso card on their Armor Wars Disney+ series which is, as of today, no longer a series. Instead, showrunner Yassir Lester will convert it into a movie that will fit somehow into the framework of the MCU. According to The Hollywood Reporter, there’s currently no director attached to the project, but Don Cheadle (obviously) is still on board to play James Rhodes/War Machine.
This is the opposite of what happened with Hawkeye, which was originally going to be the stand-alone movie for Jeremy Renner’s character before it became one of the flagship series of Phase Four. It’s also a kind of resurrection for a stand-alone War Machine movie that was scrapped years ago.
Back during development for Iron Man 3, a movie focusing on War Machine was still in the mix, with eventual Black Panther screenwriter Joe Robert Cole taking a swing at the pitch. It didn’t get far in development before getting scrapped, but Cheadle said that the concept involved Rhodes’ inherent sense of duty challenged.
“There was definitely going to be a lot of tension between his job as a military man and his allegiances to the code that he swore an oath to uphold, versus the changing world,” Cheadle told Entertainment Weekly. “I think they probably would have run afoul of each other a little bit, but I don’t know if he would have been a straight fugitive, or if he would have become decommissioned. But there was definitely going to be some tension between those two worlds.”
Now, Marvel and Cheadle get another shot at it. If Armor Wars sticks to its comic book origins, it will feature Iron Man tech falling into the hands of the wrong people, and the timely theme of questioning how we can trust anyone with superpowers keeps on keepin’ on. For now, there’s no word on whether Armor Wars will start production in 2023 or when Marvel will slide it into the stacked queue of MCU movies on the docket.
(via The Hollywood Reporter)