Update 7/26: Kevin Feige has officially confirmed the Nova movie at Comic-Con, telling Brandon Davis: “Not a damn thing, but it’s a movie.”
Nova lives, and it’s a movie now.
Deadline confirms Michael Waldron is developing a Nova feature film at Marvel Studios, with the Avengers: Doomsday, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Loki writer penning the script and eyeing the director’s chair if the project moves forward.
Per the trade, things remain in early development, and Marvel Studios and Waldron’s reps couldn’t be reached for comment.
The confirmation follows my July 8 article on Waldron’s WGA directory listing for Nova, which Deadline points to as what revealed Waldron had been brought on to tackle a new pitch.
One wrinkle: the WGA directory filed Nova under Waldron’s television employment history for the 2026-2027 season, but per Deadline, the new pitch is a feature.
Whether that’s a Guild paperwork quirk or a leftover from the show era, what Marvel is developing now is a movie. And that’s always how we thought it should be.
From dead at Disney+ to the big screen
Marvel Studios has been trying to crack Nova since at least 2022, when Moon Knight writer Sabir Pirzada was first attached to a Disney+ series, with Criminal Minds boss Ed Bernero later brought aboard as showrunner.
Marvel TV head Brad Winderbaum described the show as an ensemble piece with shades of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica that embraces how heated Richard Rider’s world gets in the comics.
Then reality hit.
As I went over last September, Nova sounded dead at Disney+ as Disney slashed MCU streaming budgets in favor of cheap, multi-season fare like Daredevil: Born Again — and a space-set cosmic series was never surviving that math.
Deadline now confirms it: the TV version was shelved in 2025.
So the character deemed too expensive for streaming gets promoted to a feature film instead. Funny how that works. It’s also the right call — Nova was always a movie.
Michael Waldron wanted Glen Powell as Nova
Here’s where it gets fun. Back in October, Waldron went on record saying Glen Powell would be “a pretty good Nova” — and as I noted at the time, the talk was already that Nova could skip streaming and debut on the big screen as part of Marvel’s cosmic plans following Avengers: Doomsday, possibly building toward Annihilation. Nine months later, here we are.
Waldron and Powell co-created Chad Powers at Hulu, and per Deadline, Waldron just wrapped production on Season 2. Nothing on casting is official — Nova doesn’t even have a green light yet — but if Waldron is writing this with an actor in mind, we know whose name is on the whiteboard. We’ve laid out the full case for Glen Powell as Nova’s frontrunner.
About that comics history, Deadline
Deadline claims Nova “first appeared in a 1976 issue of Super Adventures.” Not quite. Richard Rider debuted in Marvel’s The Man Called Nova #1 in 1976, created by Marv Wolfman — Super Adventures was the 1960s fanzine where Wolfman published the prototype for the character.
Close enough for a trade, I guess.
Deadline also points to the Skrulls as Nova’s big MCU connection.
The actual groundwork: the Nova Corps and Xandar have been in the MCU since Guardians of the Galaxy, with Glenn Close as Nova Prime and John C. Reilly as Rhomann Dey, the man who, in the comics, hands a dying Nova Corps’ power to Richard Rider.
And Xandar’s off-screen destruction at the start of Infinity War is the literal springboard for Annihilation, the story where Rider becomes the last Nova standing and the best cosmic Marvel has ever published.
If Waldron is smart, that’s the movie. Stick to Wolfman through the Abnett and Lanning era and don’t touch anything from the last decade-plus of the comics.
What happens next
Per Deadline, this is early development: Waldron writes the script, and if Marvel likes what it reads, he directs. No dates, no casting, no announcement, yet.
Marvel Studios takes over Hall H on July 25, and while a project this early almost never makes a Comic-Con stage, Kevin Feige loves a cosmic tease. CBN will be in the room either way.
