Wait, no, Don Cheadle’s MCU show Armor Wars is going to be an MCU movie now, instead
Kevin Feige and Cheadle were treating Armor Wars like a Disney Plus series as recently as this month's D23 expo
Aux News Don Cheadle
Disney has apparently pulled an audible with its streaming/theatrical release plans tonight, with Deadline reporting that Armor Wars—originally announced as a six-episode TV series focused on Don Cheadle’s Marvel Cinematic Universe character War Machine—will now be a movie, instead.
Armor Wars was originally announced back in late 2020, with the implication that it would take its story from the comic series of the same name, in which Cheadle’s Jim Rhodes is forced to recover Tony Stark’s old gadgets after they fall into a whole bunch of wrong hands. The project was being treated as a TV show, eventually fated to land on Disney+, as recently as this month’s D23 expo, when Cheadle and MCU boss man Kevin Feige got up on stage to talk about it as a series.
It’s not clear what’s shifted here; Deadline doesn’t quote any sources as to why the change has been made, or where Armor Wars will fit into the company’s already elaborate Phase Four, Five, or Six movie plans. (Collectively known as “The Multiverse Saga,” which is great news for the alternate universe versions of ourselves who aren’t already completely exhausted by multiverse stuff at this point.) Cheadle, obviously, is still attached, but it’s not clear if series head writer Yassir Lester (who co-starred with Cheadle on his Showtime show Black Monday) is still on board. [Update: Deadline’s now reporting that Lester is still involved as writer.] And there’s no word yet as to who might end up directing this thing, even as news broke this week that another long-anticipated Marvel movie, Mahershala Ali’s Blade, had just lost director Bassam Tariq.
All in all, a profoundly strange move, especially as our various entertainment megagiant overlords continue to wrestle with the question of what, exactly, the point of their big streaming offerings actually is. Did someone run the math on Armor Wars, and decide the budget didn’t make sense without a big box office return to accompany it? Was the story deemed too slight to support six hours of TV storytelling? Or was a spot on the movie release calendar just looking a bit too anemic? It’s possible we might never know, but one thing’s for sure: Armor Wars is a movie now, we guess.
23 Comments
Ever get the feeling Marvel/Feige has no clue how this so-called Multiverse saga is going to proceed, let alone end? At this point, it looks like they’ve bitten off far more than they can chew.
If there’s one thing I know about the guy who masterminded the incredibly successful and profitable Infinity Saga, it’s that he has no idea what he’s doing!
I’d guess they know where they’re going with the multiverse stuff. However, Phase 4 is a trainwreck and the fact that it doesn’t have its own capstone event and just ends with Black Panther and they think that the tease at the end of that is enough to justify it’s this as a phase is a mess.
Phase 4 is a little weird in terms of content and structure, but COVID could easily be to blame for that.
Covid can be blamed for some it. But they can take the blame for making detrimental changes to the stories due to Covid on themselves.
I mean phase two ended with….Ant-Man? Ending it with Black Panther instead of a big team up movie is by design. After Endgame they had a choice they could build up to an even bigger team up event (maybe the bad guy wants to wipe out 3/4 of all sentient life!) or they could let that kinda movie rest for a bit so it was more impactful the next time they do it. The execution of phase four has left a lot to be desired, but I understand not wanting it to contain an Avengers film.
Phase 2 has Ultron though.That’s understandable that they want to do another huge event after Endgame, that’s fine.There still should be some type of cohesive point that constitutes a phase. I mean Ant-Man is the film after Black Panther, they could just say that’s the end due to Kang.But the fact that Phase 4 is mostly just here’s all this stuff that will be connected eventually isn’t good enough.
I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me at all. I think the “phases” thing was probably more helpful for Marvel Studios than it was for the audience. The real theme of Phase Four is “lets start doing TV shows” and they’ve done quite well. I didn’t love all of them but they’re doing so much better than Star Wars did.
I’d say Phases was important to audiences because it focused the marketing. A Phase told you you were getting something close to an “arc”, which Phase 4 doesn’t have. I’d still argue it’s alarming that Phase 4 has more content with TV and Film than other Phases and still has no real connective tissue other than “this is the MCU now, we exist to exist”.
I think it’s pretty generous to say the other phases had an arc. They were building to something at the end of phase three. Phase one is various solo movies building to an avenger’s movie. Phase two starts with Iron Man quitting and blowing up all his suits. A major development that’s completely ignored in Ultron. There is little linking the five films that aren’t called Avengers. As I said before ending it on Ant-Man rather than Ultron just underscores how arbitrary it was.It gets better with Phase three because they were fairly sure at that point what they were building towards. But still there’s little thematic consistency. In one movie (a comedy) it’s stressed that Thors hammer is not the source of it’s power, in the next (a drama) it suddenly is.
Phase 1: What’s up with these McGuffins?
Phase 2: We got to get these McGuffins!
Phase 3: We got the McGuffins!
Phase 4: Shit. We are out of McGuffins.
Who’s Jack Elam?
“I think the “phases” thing was probably more helpful for Marvel Studios than it was for the audience.”Yes, I saw nearly all the movies, and never heard of the “phases” until about 6 months ago. Whatever they are, they don’t matter. Time will eat the MCU like it eats everything else.
lol
I think that not having a “capstone event” is intentional, though. The worst thing they could’ve done to follow up Endgame was to try to immediately start some new BIG FUCKING THING right away. They needed time to settle down. Sure, the pandemic made a mess of things, but in a way it worked towards what they were doing, anyway. Giving the MCU a chance to tell some smaller stories while giving themselves some breathing room to start building towards the next BIG FUCKING (multiverse) THING. Phase 4 has really been about two things (maybe three): settling down and finding a new baseline reality after the blip, introducing the next wave of heroes who have mostly grown up in a world with the Avengers, and, maybe, closing out the stories of/ providing a swan song for/ moving the characters past the active Avengers status of – the original team members. (SPOILER STUFF)
Barton is well and truly retired, but mentoring the next Hawkeye. Hulk is on a desert island (or off in outer space), mentoring (from a distance) She-Hulk. Thor is off with his adopted daughter beating up bad guys on distant planets. Spider-Man has been reset (in the saddest way possible) to the “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” without a crazy nanobot suit. We have a new Hawkeye, a new Black Widow, a new (She)Hulk, TWO new Marvels, a new Captain America, and a new Black Panther. Potentially America Chavez will be “Miss America”, though they’ll probably drop the comic book name, plus Shang-Chi. Also, they seem to be preparing the groundwork for the X-Men with the way the Sokovian Accords are being used as the MCU equivalent of the Mutant Registration Act. We’re seeing that what’s left of the Avengers aren’t really much of a team, anymore, especially without Tony Stark’s endless financing. It’s mostly just Sam and Bucky, with everyone else retired or doing their own thing. They’ve laid the groundwork for the existence of the multiverse with Loki, Spider-Man, and Dr Strange. I think all this was necessary. There needed to be some time and some stories told that make no effort whatsoever to match or top Endgame. Plus, they’re doing something that no other franchise has ever managed, and that the comics simply can’t due to the nature of comics. They’re truly moving past the original heroes. Tony Stark needs to stay dead, Steve Rogers needs to stay wherever he is, Natasha Romanov needs to stay dead, because it’s a place full of great storytelling possibilities that most franchises don’t have the longevity to pull off. Now we get to see characters pick up those titles and try to live up to the universe-saving legacy of those now larger-than-life, borderline mythological heroes. We don’t need a bunch of flashbacks and exposition to explain why Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are such tough acts to follow because we were THERE. Yeah, we’re going to miss those characters, but that’s part of the point.
I think a lot of people have already forgotten that the MCU didn’t really start on sure footing and definitely changed with the direction of the wind. The Hulk fell sort of flat so they followed the success of Iron Man, the sequel to which was a bit of a dud. Then you had the magic of Joss Whedon TM, which lasted all of one film.
They’ve cleared a hill, and ended on a somewhat good note, but the next phase hasn’t found its “Iron Man”.
It’s kind of hard to understand what you’re saying…Iron Man was a definitive success and is how Marvel started off. Iron Man 2 was almost assuredly greenlit as a quick follow because of how well Iron Man did, I don’t get how you’re drawing the line between that movie and Hulk. And The Avengers was a definitive success too.Phase 1 was a bit uneven but it started and ended very strongly. And it had a relatively cohesive story as the movies all built towards the plot of The Avengers. Phase 4 may end strongly (BP2 looks great) but it definitely won’t have that same level of cohesion.
Almost like they have multiple universes of stories they can tell.
No.
It does feel that way especially with the Deadpool 3 announcement it just feels like they keep being like “here’s all of our ideas, and and we just had another one so here take that too” like for real at this point I still dont believe Iron Wars is happening. Like what the fuck is the “Agatha” show? That does not strike me as anything remotely building toward anything. They’re just meandering and calling it the multiverse saga. More like the “we can do whatever the fuck we want and retcon it in the next film” saga.
The evidence is in the fact that the first 4 disney shows were spinoffs of the aftermath of Endgame. They clearly haven’t figured out what do post-Thanos and if things slide far enough downhill I bet they’ll just throw the X-Men at us as the safety net. It feels lazier.
lol
Hopefully Marvel is learning that some of these shows are not working at all (She-Hulk, Miss Marvel, Falcon & Winter Soldier, Hawkeye), and would have been better suited as movies. These shows don’t have nearly enough material for a full season.
Miss Marvel had the strangest plotting. They were building for a climax with a main antagonist that sort of suddenly came to a head without a climax in episode 5. And Falcon and the Winter Solider was both boring and weirdly uneven, it was a huge letdown after Wandavision.