Marvel Studios announces NOVA movie from LOKI head writer Michael Waldron

Marvel Studios insiders have teased a major update to the studio’s film roster. Michael Waldron, the head writer behind Loki and co-writer of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Avengers: Doomsday, has been tapped to pen (and possibly direct) a Nova feature-length project, according to Deadline. The project, long stuck in development limbo as a Disney+ series, has finally found its shape as a theatrical film, making it the third confirmed title in Marvel’s Phase Seven slate, alongside X-Men and Black Panther 3.

Nova has been kicking around Marvel’s development slate for years, with Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige teasing a Nova project as far back as 2024, telling ComicBook.com it was “three or four years out.” For awhile, Moon Knight writer Sabir Pirzada was attached to a Nova series for Disney+, but that version was quietly shelved in 2025, and insiders stress this new feature is still in early development.

Waldron’s involvement first surfaced when his WGA card leaked, revealing the Nova project buried in his credits. “The title came up again when Waldron’s WGA card was leaked with the project being listed as a credit leading to the reveal that Waldron had been brought on to tackle a new pitch,” Deadline reported on Monday, July 13, 2026.

The trade continues on to say that “the project is still in early development but that Waldron is on board to pen the script with an eye to directing the project if it moves forward.”

Who is Nova, exactly? 

For readers who need the primer: Richard Rider, the character most associated with the Nova name, was created by Marv Wolfman and John Romita Sr., and debuted in The Man Called Nova #1 in 1976. A Long Island teenager randomly chosen by the dying Xandarian Rhomann Dey to inherit Nova Corps power, Rider became a founding member of the New Warriors before eventually absorbing the entire Nova Force — and the sentient Xandarian supercomputer Worldmind — as the sole survivor of the Annihilation Wave.

What’s worth sitting with here isn’t just the casting speculation (fans are floating Glen Powell for the lead, largely because Waldron is also the lead writer on Powell’s Hulu series Chad Powers), but what a Nova movie is actually being asked to do: the Nova Corps was first introduced in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy as an intergalactic police force and then wiped out off-screen, as collateral damage in Thanos’s relentless galaxy-wide pursuit for the ultimate power in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War. This MCU backdrop sets up Richard Rider’s comic-book origin story perfectly, as the character has always been tied to surviving the destruction of the Nova police order and to unilaterally inheriting its power. A solo film built on that premise is, structurally, an origin story that requires an atrocity as its precondition, so the genocide of Xandar isn’t backstory dressing; it’s the engine.

That’s a very different narrative problem than, say, Steve Rogers waking up in the wrong decade. It asks: what does it mean for a hero to inherit the authority of an annihilated police force, rather than to found or reform one? Does the film interrogate the Corps as an institution — its policing logic, its claim to jurisdiction over “civilized space” — or does it simply transplant that authority onto a single likable body and move on? Given that Marvel shelved an earlier, more expansive series treatment of this material (with Pirzada, then later Ed Bernero, attached) in favor of a tighter feature format, there’s a real question of whether the compression forces the film toward spectacle over any sustained reckoning with what the Corps was.

Marvel Studios and reps for Waldron have not yet commented. However, the news broke just days before San Diego Comic-Con 2026, fueling speculation that Marvel could drop more details during its Hall H presentation.