Marvel’s Armor Wars: Don Cheadle Calls Series “Rebirth” for MCU’s Rhodey

Don Cheadle’s Marvel plate is getting fuller by the minute. In the studio’s first live-action offering of the new year, Cheadle will reprise his role as James “Rhodey” Rhodes in the political thriller Secret Invasion. Then not too long after that, the actor will help bring Armor Wars to fruition, the first project within the Marvel Cinematic Universe to feature that actor and character in a lead role. The property was once set to be a series on Disney+ but has since been turned into a theatrical film release. According to Cheadle, the feature film will be a rebirth of sorts for his fan-favorite character.

“What does he want to do? What are his desires outside of the relationship with these people we’ve already seen? Who is he when he’s by himself?” Cheadle said in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly. “A lot of these things we haven’t seen before so there’s a good opportunity to explore that stuff and hopefully create a full character that now when we see the suit, we see everything else… It’s a rebirth in a way. It’s coming back to this character, but we’ve never gone to the places we’re about to go in the show, so I feel like in some ways we’re just getting to know him even after all this time.”

What is Armor Wars about?

Pulling inspiration from the comic series donning the same name, Armor Wars will follow a similar plot that sees Tony Stark’s technology fall into the wrong hands. In live-action, the events of Secret Invasion will serve as a precursor to the film.

“If you know anything about the lore, and you’ve read the comic books, you understand that it’s a series that was built around Tony’s Stark Tech getting out and Rhodey taking it on to go get this tech back from the bad hands, the bad actors whose hands it is in,” the actor added. “And as Marvel does, it’s also an opportunity to take the mythology and tip it on its head a little bit and come up with different ways to tell the story, so it’s doing that and has done that in spades.”

Armor Wars has yet to set a release date. What other characters would you like to see in the Marvel film? Let us know your thoughts either in the comments section or by hitting our writer @AdamBarnhardt up on Twitter to chat all things MCU!