Sam Rockwell Reportedly in Talks to Return to the MCU in ARMOR WARS Movie
A new report has surfaced regarding Marvel Studios’ long-in-development Marvel movie Armor Wars. This recent update comes from scooper Daniel Richtman, who says that Iron Man 2 star Sam Rockwell is in talks to reprise his role in the MCU as Justin Hammer.
It also said that Marvel is hoping to hire a director to take on the film project in the first quarter of 2024. The studio is hoping to start shooting the film in 2025, which would put the film on track to be released in 2026/2027.
There are no other details to share, but it would be interesting to see Rockwell back in the role of Justin Hammer! I’d be curious to see how the studio might continue his story in a film that will see Don Cheadle’s War Machine back in action!
Rockwell has said in the past that he would be open to playing Hammer again and he actually did come back for the role in an episode of What If...? Season 2, where he played a Variant of the villain who invaded Avengers Tower on Christmas Eve, and jumped into the Hulkbuster armor to battle Happy "The Freak" Hogan.
When asked whether he'd like to be part of a project such as Thunderbolts, he responded, "Yeah, definitely. I would be into that. [Thunderbolts] sounds cool...[Hammer's] fun, he's a real Lex Luthor."
Armor Wars was originally planned as a series, but was reworked as a movie because the studio was committed to “getting the story told the right way and in that process realized that a feature was better suited for the project.”
Marvel producer Nate Moore (Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) previously opened up about why Armor Wars is the kind of project that needs to be a film versus a series, saying: "When you're talking about a show that wants to be about seeing all the cool armors and Don Cheadle interacting with all these armors and, sort of, the legacy of Tony Stark? That became kind of cost prohibitive to do as a show."
During a previous interview, Don Cheadle teased how his character will be explored in the Marvel movie, explaining that for the first time, we’ll get to see what makes Rhodey tick. He said: "The fun part about it is that we're going to continue to explore Rhodey and — in some ways for the first time — get to see what makes him tick. We understand his physical challenges, but we haven't really yet dug into a lot of his emotional and psychological [challenges]."
We don’t know much about Marvel's adaptation of Armor Wars, or the story that it will tell. But we do know that Yassir Lester is writing the script, and Cheadle will be joined by Walton Goggins, who is returning to reprise his role as Sonny Burch from Ant-Man and the Wasp.