Avalanche Studios, developer of Just Cause and Mad Max, was approached by Disney and Marvel around 2012 to build an open-world Iron Man game. The project was never publicly announced and was quietly shelved before it reached any kind of release.
Now, thanks to more than an hour of leaked footage from the cancelled Iron Man game, we can finally see what Avalanche Studios was cooking. The footage appeared on Reddit's r/GamingLeaksAndRumours and the Internet Archive, reportedly sourced from a PlayStation 3 development kit.
The footage is clearly unfinished and far from polished, but the DNA of an Avalanche game is visible throughout. Iron Man moves with the fluidity and speed that defined the Just Cause series, flying across large open environments and tearing through destructible buildings. Combat takes clear inspiration from the Batman Arkham games, with rhythmic melee exchanges blended with repulsor blasts, missiles, and other gadgets.
One of the more complete sections appears to be an unfinished E3 demo, showing more focused gameplay sequences designed to present the game in its best light. Before this leaked footage, the only public confirmation of its existence came from Avalanche co-founder Christofer Sundberg, who discussed the project in a 2022 interview with MinnMax.
Sundberg explained that Disney wanted to cut roughly a year from the game's development schedule while simultaneously pushing for a significant expansion of the team. "It would have broken the studio completely," he said, describing the situation as company politics rather than any fundamental problem with the game itself. He added that he thought it was shaping up to be "really, really good" before it was scrapped.
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Avalanche's cancelled Iron Man should not be confused with EA Motive's Iron Man game, which entered development in 2022 and remains in progress despite EA cancelling a separate Black Panther game last year. Four years on with no updates, a reveal for that project would be welcome, and the leaked Avalanche footage is a timely reminder of just how well Iron Man's mechanics could translate to an open-world action game when handled by the right studio.
