A familiar face at Saturday’s D23 Expo event was Don Cheadle (No Sudden Move, Hotel Rwanda), the actor who has played James “Rhodey” Rhodes since Iron Man 2. Cheadle joined Marvel President Kevin Feige to update the public on the status of Armor Wars, the series announced at Disney’s investors’ day two years ago. Many fans worried the show had been canned since it was absent from Marvel’s San Diego Comic-Con presentation in July. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
According to Comicbook, the series is still in the works and donned a brand new logo at the presentation. Centered around the aftermath of Tony Stark’s death in Avengers: Endgame, Armor Wars will explore the power vacuum created by the Stark Industries CEO’s absence. Several entities will battle in a technology race for what will become the next evolution in the power suit. Cheadle spoke on the plot and how War Machine is connected as being a successor of sorts to Stark’s legacy, similar to the way Anthony Mackie’s (Falcon and the Winter Soldier, She Hate Me) Sam Wilson will have to wrestle with following Steve Rogers’ footsteps.
“The death of Tony Stark, I’m pretty sure, will play a role in the series,” Cheadle explained in a 2021 BroBible interview via Comicbook. “Where we’ve been sort of progressing Rhodey—even in the last film where he’s now up again and he’s now walking again and he’s now mobile again—so as the technology continues to develop and we keep making innovations in the suit and what happens, I imagine there’s gonna be another elevation and another way that we’re going to keep digging into that part of Rhodey. But really, figuring out a way to bridge what’s happening in the comic books with what’s happening on screen in the MCU and how we’re going to make those worlds work, that’s really exciting.”
Narratively, Cheadle informed the expo audience that Armor Wars will be set sometime after the highly-anticipated Secret Invasion series starring Samuel L. Jackson (Last Days of Ptolemy Gray, Captain Marvel) as Nick Fury. That show is set to bow sometime next year. It was also announced, according to Comicbook, that Walter Goggins (Justified, The Righteous Gemstones) will return as his Ant-Man and the Wasp character, Sonny Burch. Fans will be reunited with Paul Rudd’s (Clueless, The Shrink Next Door) Scott Lang early next year for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Armor Wars is set to begin filming in 2023.