We haven't had many (any?) official updates on Armor Wars since Marvel Studios announced that the project was being developed as a feature back in 2022, but last year, we heard that the studio had yet to make a "final decision" on the movie one way or the other, and could still choose not to move forward.
More recently, scooper Daniel Richtman reported that the project is being "reworked" after the negative response to Disney+'s Secret Invasion series, and is "expected to focus on entirely different things than originally planned."
While this might well have been true at the time (and could still be, of course), MTTSH has now suggested that the movie has been cancelled altogether. We've done some digging of our own, and were told that Armor Wars is indeed "as good as dead."
If accurate, this wouldn't really be too surprising. Though a War Machine-focused story incorporating elements from David Michelinie and Bob Layton's comic run had a lot of potential, Marvel's decision to make Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Don Cheadle) a Skrull imposter in Secret Invasion most likely backed the studio into a bit of a corner from a creative standpoint.
Here's what Cheadle had to say about the status of the project and the highly divisive Secret Invasion twist during a 2024 interview.
"You can find out and let me know," he joked when asked about Armor Wars. "I don’t know, I’m not sure where anything is right now. I think things are going through a lot of changes, and we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what it is."
"Uh... you know, there was no... it wasn’t a demand," he added when asked about his major character ret-con. "It was a request. What do you think about playing this?' And it was to set up stuff in' the following thing. So, if the following thing happens, and all those things were set up, then that’s one thing. If, as you said, it doesn’t, then we can talk about how I feel about it after!"
If Armor Wars hasn't been scrapped and is simply being overhauled, it obviously remains to be seen what the movie will focus on, but the previous incarnation was said to pick up after the events of Secret Invasion, detailing exactly what happened to the real Rhodey when he was replaced by a Skrull imposter. There were also rumors that Sam Rockwell was set to return as Iron Man 2 baddie Justin Hammer.