‘As good as dead’: A Marvel movie starring an actual Avenger and a 2-time Emmy nominee looks to have been killed off for good

With 34 films under its belt (and three more coming this year alone), Marvel Studios has released more movies than any other franchise across its 17 years and counting — but even Kevin Feige stumbles sometimes and the MCU’s history is littered with the corpses of Marvel movies that never were. R.I.P. Vin Diesel’s Inhumans. Fly with the angels, The Incredible Hulk 2. Sucks to be you, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.

Now it seems we can add another to this select, ignominious list. Marvel’s Multiverse Saga is infamously cluttered with projects that have been announced but have yet to materialize. Still, in most cases, we’re hoping that given enough time they’ll sort themselves out. Yes, even Blade. When it comes to this particular production, though, the latest intel is suggesting Marvel is definitively washing its hands of a film it’s been trying to bring to life for at least five years.

A solo project for one of the MCU’s oldest heroes has supposedly been scrapped

Anyone out there still desperately waiting for news on Armor Wars? Well, if you are then I have some bad news for you. The most recent updates on the long-struggling War Machine-centric project indicate that the House of Ideas has run out of ideas on this one and it’s now officially canned.

First of all, scooper MyTimeToShineHello obliquely suggested Armor Wars was fated never to test its mettle (or metal) when they responded to a GIF of Don Cheadle’s Rhodey with the tweet, “Wish his movie wasn’t cancelled.” ComicBookMovie then did some digging of their own and their sources told them that the film was “as good as dead.” Yikes. Obviously, it’s entirely up to you how much stock you put into such uncorroborated information, but it’s certainly not looking good.

Originally announced in December 2020, Armor Wars began life as a Disney Plus series, but Marvel soon felt confident enough in the concept to bump it up to a feature. Comedian, actor, and writer Yassir Lester was attached to provide the screenplay, whose story was set to see Cheadle’s Rhodey confronting “one of Tony Stark’s greatest fears when Stark’s tech falls into the wrong hands.”

We never did find out whose hands were the wrong ones, but we do know who would’ve given them the Stark tech. Two-time Emmy nominee Walton Goggins was due to reprise his role as black market broker Sonny Burch from Ant-Man and the Wasp (and What If…? season 3). At one point, shooting was pegged for early 2023 in London, but needless to say that never happened.

The death-knell for Armor Wars was likely Cheadle’s prior MCU return in Secret Invasion, the universally panned streaming embarrassment that implied Rhodey had been a Skrull imposter since 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. That left Armor Wars with the need to rescue (or perhaps retcon) that highly controversial storyline, which may have ultimately proven too great a task.

Who knows, maybe reports of Armor Wars‘ death have been greatly exaggerated and it’ll assemble on our screens eventually. What with the production troubles of this year’s Ironheart, however, it sure seems like all of Marvel’s attempts to spinoff the Iron Man franchise are proving a lot trickier than you’d think. No wonder they brought Robert Downey Jr. back for Avengers: Doomsday (aka The Kang Dynasty‘s murderer).