Epic Delays the Marvel and Star Wars Shooter for AI

Epic Games has delayed an unannounced Marvel and Star Wars shooter that had been aimed at March 2027, and told the team to stop writing code by hand. The Fortnite and Unreal Engine company now wants the game finished as an AI-first production, using tools such as Anthropic’s Claude, with people guiding the output. Disney, which put $1.5 billion into Epic in 2024 for a multi-game partnership, has not issued a public comment.

People familiar with the project said Epic had already fallen behind, in part because it underestimated how many staffers and how much time the shooter would take. The first title in that Disney deal is now the place where Epic is trying to prove a pipeline no large studio has shipped at this scale.

Disney’s $1.5 Billion Bet Now Has No Launch Date

On February 7, 2024, The Walt Disney Company said it would invest $1.5 billion for an equity stake in Epic and start a multiyear project for a new games and entertainment universe tied to Fortnite. The persistent world was meant to let people play, watch, shop, and engage with characters from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more, all powered by Unreal Engine.

Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, called it Disney’s biggest entry ever into the world of games. Tim Sweeney, Epic’s founder and CEO, said the companies were building a persistent, open, and interoperable setup that would bring the Disney and Fortnite communities together. Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences, said Epic’s tech would help Disney reach people “where they are.”

THE DISNEY DEAL IN FIGURES

• The check: Disney put $1.5 billion into Epic on February 7, 2024, next to a multi-game partnership.
• The proof of crowd: A prior Fortnite Marvel event, Nexus War with Galactus, drew more than 15.3 million concurrent players.
• The parks install: Disney already uses Unreal on more than 15 Parks attractions, including Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run.
• The first shooter: People on the project said the Marvel and Star Wars title was meant to open the multi-game pact in March 2027.

That shooter was never publicly announced. It still has no new date. A Disney spokesperson did not immediately respond when the delay became public on October 12, 2026, and no later statement has surfaced.

Why the Marvel and Star Wars Shooter Slipped

People familiar with the work said development ran slower than Epic expected because the company misjudged headcount and calendar. Then, on a video call in early October, staff on the game were told to switch to an “AI first” production model. Humans would manage and guide work generated by models such as Claude. Some people on that call were stunned. A few hoped the order was not serious, or that Epic would reverse it, arguing the plan would not work as well as leadership expected.

The delay and the new pipeline arrived together. Epic did not address the existence of the Disney-themed shooter in its public comments, but it did defend the method. Jake Jones, Epic’s communications director, said, “We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do.”

People on the project described the effort as the first time a large studio had tried to build a title primarily with AI. That is a heavy claim for two of the most guarded catalogs in entertainment, and it is sitting on a game that already missed the staffing guess that was supposed to get it to March 2027.

Staff Were Told to Stop Writing Code by Hand

The sharpest line did not come from Jones. It came from inside the team. In an internal message, one of the game’s directors told staff, “No more hand-written code.” The same director said all art for the game would be “generated with full AI workflows.”

THE AI-FIRST ORDERS

• The code rule: Directors told staff there would be no more hand-written code, with models such as Claude producing it and people guiding the result.
• The art rule: All art is supposed to come from full AI workflows, not a side experiment on a few concept boards.
• The human job: Staff remain in the loop as managers of generated work, which is the part Epic now calls vision and creative drive.

On the call, some developers joked about asking Claude to fix its own mistakes. That joke is the tell. If the model is both the author and the debugger, the remaining craft is prompt, review, and taste, and those are the jobs that have to hold two of Disney’s most valuable worlds to a shippable bar.

Epic has been pushing AI across its divisions for some time. The difference here is the mandate. A delayed, unannounced Disney shooter is no longer being asked to try the tools. It is being asked to finish through them.

Sweeney Says the Pivot Means More Games, Not Fewer People

Hours around the delay, Sweeney posted that Epic has a huge pivot underway, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration. He wrote that the aim is not to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone at Epic to build more and better stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.

We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration.

The aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) October 12, 2026

He later said the biggest change will be a much faster path from an idea to playtesting it, and that many recent big-budget failures came from systems that went too far in development before anyone could play them. That is a real production argument. It is also the argument he reached for when the replies turned on whether he was reading the room.

Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it’s not. Our job, as the provider of tools and technology to much of the industry, is to design for the present that is and the future that will soon be.

Tim Sweeney, CEO, Epic Games, on X

He added that he is optimistic and sees the shift as empowering for creators. The unanswered question in the same thread was simpler: how this lines up with firing over 1,000 people. He did not reply to that one. The remaining staff’s security is the live nerve under the playtest pitch. Faster loops do not, on their own, explain a headcount cut that Sweeney had already said was not about AI.

Epic’s March Note Put AI Outside the Layoffs

On March 24, 2026, Sweeney sent staff a note that Epic posted publicly. He said the company was laying off over 1,000 Epic employees. “I’m sorry we’re here again,” he wrote. A downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 meant Epic was spending significantly more than it was making, and it had to make major cuts to keep the company funded. The layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles, would put Epic in a more stable place, he said.

He listed industry pressure, weaker spending, and consoles selling less than last generation. He also listed Epic’s own problems: seasons that did not always deliver “Fortnite magic,” an early return to mobile, and the cost of fighting platform fights. Then he drew a line that October has now walked up to.

“Since it’s a thing now, I should note that the layoffs aren’t related to AI,” he wrote. “To the extent it improves productivity, we want to have as many awesome developers developing great content and tech as we can.” Impacted staff were promised at least four months of base pay, with more based on tenure, plus Epic-paid healthcare, including six months in the United States, and faster stock-option vesting through January 2027.

FROM THE DISNEY CHECK TO THE DELAY

1. February 7, 2024: Disney announces the $1.5 billion stake and a Fortnite-tied universe for Marvel, Star Wars, and other brands.
2. May 16, 2025: Fortnite ships an AI-voiced Darth Vader; players bait it into profanity and slurs; Epic hotfixes the character within 30 minutes.
3. May 19, 2025: SAG-AFTRA files an unfair labor practice charge against Llama Productions, an Epic subsidiary, over AI voice use without bargaining.
4. March 24, 2026: Epic cuts over 1,000 jobs and Sweeney writes that the layoffs are not related to AI.
5. June 22, 2026: Epic publishes its Unreal Engine 6 plan, with Claude, Gemini, and other models wired in through MCP.
6. July 2026: Epic adds AI voices to 36 Fortnite skins for a conversations feature that opens more widely on July 30.
7. Early October 2026: Staff on the Marvel and Star Wars shooter get the AI-first order on a video call.
8. October 12, 2026: The March 2027 target is gone, with no new date, and Sweeney posts the company-wide pivot.

Put the March sentence next to the October mandate and the irony is sitting in Epic’s own words. The company that said it wanted as many awesome developers as it could get is now telling a Disney team that handwritten code is over. The aim, Sweeney says, is still not fewer people. The count from March is still over 1,000 people gone, and the shooter still needed more staff than Epic had planned.

Fortnite’s AI Vader Already Went Off Script

Epic has not been shy about putting generative tools on Disney’s characters. In May 2025 it added a Darth Vader NPC that could talk back in real time. The voice was built with Google’s Gemini 2.0 and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5, trained on James Earl Jones, who had licensed his Vader voice before his death in 2024. Epic said the family had agreed. Jones’s family said he felt the voice was inseparable from Star Wars and wanted fans to keep hearing it.

Players still broke it in public. Streamer Loserfruit got Vader to echo “freaking” and “fucking,” after which the character scolded her for vulgarity. Other sessions pulled the bot into slurs and odd counsel, including a line that Spanish was “a useful tongue for smugglers and spice traders.” Epic said it pushed a hotfix within 30 minutes and that this should not happen again. A parental control was added so families could block voice and written communication with AI features. If a player kept pushing the character past its settings, Vader would leave the squad for that session.

The labor fight landed days later. SAG-AFTRA told the National Labor Relations Board that Llama Productions had made unilateral changes by using AI-generated voices to replace bargaining-unit work, without notice or a chance to bargain. The union’s point was not that Jones’s estate had refused. It was that other Vader game actors, and the contract around them, had been cut out. At least 54 performers have voiced Vader in games over the years when Jones was not on the session.

In July 2026 Epic went further inside Fortnite itself. It added consistent AI voices and personas to 36 existing skins, including original characters such as Fishstick and Cuddle Team Leader, for creator islands. Epic said 17 of those 36 were locked so they would sound and react as expected out of the box. The company said the voices were powered by performances from independent professionals who agreed to have that work used to build the models, and that it still planned to talk with guilds and prior Battle Royale voice actors. The conversations feature, running on Gemini and ElevenLabs’ Eleven V3, was set to move out of experiment on July 30.

So the Marvel and Star Wars shooter is not Epic’s first contact with these IPs and these models. It is the first time the company has told a full game team that the art and the code both start there, after Fortnite already showed how fast a Star Wars bot can be yanked off-brand.

Unreal Engine 6 Puts Claude on Every Licensee’s Desk

The shooter is the loud case. The quieter one is the engine. On June 22, 2026, Marcus Wassmer, who leads Epic’s development team, published the company’s Unreal Engine 6 plan. UE4 opened the engine up, he wrote. UE5 reinvented how worlds get built. UE6 is about how those worlds get shipped and run. Over about two years, Epic intends to fold Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite into one product.

One of the three pillars is model-assisted work. Epic is building an MCP with integrations for Claude and Gemini, and other models, as what it calls creativity and productivity multipliers, so teams spend less time on manual setup of levels, rigs, particles, skinning, and lighting. Wassmer wrote that LLMs and tools like Claude and Codex will play a central role in UE6 while developers keep creative control. Unreal Engine 5.8 already shipped an experimental MCP plugin so Claude can operate inside a project, not only paste snippets. The interface is open: Claude, Gemini, or whatever fits.

Internally, Epic has already opened code generation and AI analysis across backend, engine, and game teams, with better luck so far on custom tools, crash analysis, tests, and services than on mainline Unreal code. Wassmer said that will probably come. Early access for UE6 is targeted at the end of 2027, with the full release 12 to 18 months later. A UE6 development stream on GitHub is already public. That calendar puts engine early access in the same season the Disney shooter was once supposed to launch.

PLAN VERSUS WHERE IT STANDS

Sweeney’s Unreal line is the one that outlives this one game. Epic sells tools to much of the industry, and he says the job is to design for the present and the future that will soon be. The present, for the Disney team, is a slipped shooter, a director’s ban on handwritten code, and a partner that has not spoken. The future he is shipping sits on GitHub for every licensee to pick up, whether or not Marvel and Star Wars ever make that March window.