While Marvel Studios is a collective of passionate producers and executives, studio head Kevin Feige inevitably becomes the face of its many successes. However, there are many high-level executives of production and development, like Nate Moore, a producer on the “Captain America” and “Black Panther” franchises, that have been integral lieutenants to the company. Moore is part of what is known as The Parliament at Marvel, the elite group of execs who are ultimately responsible for all the big decisions alongside Feige. And recently, Moore gave some interesting insight and background on the development of Don Cheadle‘s solo adventure “Armor Wars,” which was originally announced as a streaming series on Disney+ but was recently upgraded to a feature film.
While speaking on The Town podcast With Matthew Belloni (you can listen to that interview below), Moore offered some fascinating understanding of Marvel’s development process, how they put together their films with writers/directors and explained why Marvel studios decided to change “Armor Wars” from a series to a feature film.
READ MORE: ‘Armor Wars’: Don Cheadle’s Marvel Series Upgraded To A Movie
“There were some great ideas coming out for that series that, to be quite honest, were too big for that show,” he explained, suggesting that the ambition of what needed to be done in the story warranted a cinematic big budget. “Our Disney+ shows are awesome, and we love them, but the budgets are not the same as the features; that’s no secret. And when you’re talking about a show that wants to be about all the cool armors and Don Cheadle interacting with all these armors and sort of the legacy of Tony Stark, that became cost prohibitive to do as a show. And we realized as a feature, not only can we get into some of the beautiful imagery that is from publishing, and there is certainly an ‘Armor Wars’ run, but, also, there are ways to leverage the ideas of that movie and affect other movies down the line.”
Cheadle will reprise the Rhodey/War Machine role with his pal Yassir Lester from “Black Monday” writing the film. No director has been announced yet.
“Armor Wars” is loosely based on an “Iron Man” comic book run that saw Tony Stark’s technology falling into the hands of various villains and saw Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer as an antagonist. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that the studio can convince Rockwell to return as Hammer; the last time we saw him, he was enjoying himself at Seagate Prison just before “Shang-Chi” villain Wenwu broke out Trevor Slattery and kidnapped him for pretending to be the terrorist leader of The Ten Rings in “Iron Man 3.”
You can hear Moore go into more detail about Marvel’s development process, how they decide to give a character their own project, how they pick filmmakers, and more below.