Epic's unannounced Disney shooter — the one meant to mix Marvel and Star Wars characters — no longer has a March 2027 ship date. Bloomberg's reporting, echoed by VGC, Ars Technica, and Polygon, says the team has been told to rebuild production around generative AI instead. Those accounts, Epic's on-record responses, and Tim Sweeney's Oct 12 post were checked on Oct 12, 2026, at 3:27 p.m. PT.
What staff were told
According to Bloomberg's sources, a director on the project told developers there would be "no more hand-written code" and that art would be "generated with full AI workflows," with humans steering tools such as Anthropic's Claude rather than authoring the work themselves. Progress had already run behind schedule; the same report says Epic underestimated how many people the game needed. Some staff on an internal call last week joked about asking Claude to fix its own mistakes.
Disney put $1.5 billion into Epic in 2024 as part of a multi-game partnership. That deal is the backdrop for this shooter, which outlets describe as an extraction-style title using Marvel and Star Wars IP. No new release window has been announced.
What Epic said in public
An Epic spokesperson told reporters the company is "embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do." Shortly after Bloomberg published, CEO Tim Sweeney posted that Epic has "a huge pivot underway" to "retool for maximum AI acceleration," framing the goal as enabling teams to build more and better work — not the same work with fewer people — and to carry those tools into Unreal for other studios.
Sweeney has argued for months that AI will sit inside nearly every future production pipeline, and Epic has already shipped AI-voiced Fortnite characters under the Disney partnership. Monday's comments line up with that stance; they do not confirm a new date for the shooter, and Epic has not published a detailed technical plan for how AI-generated code and art will ship in a live game.
Until Epic posts a fresh schedule, the only firm points are the lost March 2027 target, the AI-first mandate reported by Bloomberg, and the company's public defense of the pivot.