Epic Games has told staff to build its unannounced Disney-licensed game with an AI-first workflow, and the shift has already cost the project its March 2027 release date, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier and sources familiar with the matter.

Schreier reported that Epic management instructed employees to move development of the title — a shooter featuring Marvel and Star Wars heroes — toward artificial intelligence tools. The release has slipped from March 2027 to an indefinite date. It's a two-year-plus commitment erased from the calendar in a single strategic pivot.

What does AI-first actually mean here?

Per Schreier's reporting, neural networks will handle both programming and graphics creation. Epic wants to generate code using tools like Anthropic's Claude, with human developers reviewing the AI output for errors and making corrections. The model isn't headcount replacement on paper — it's generation at machine speed with humans as the QA layer.

That's a meaningful operational change for a studio of Epic's scale. If code generation moves to Claude-class tools across the company, the bottleneck shifts from writing software to verifying it. Review capacity, not engineering throughput, becomes the constraint on shipping.

Staff learned on a video call

Schreier's sources said Epic employees learned about the course change during a video call last week. The news left them stunned. At least some developers later expressed hope that management might reconsider and abandon the initiative.

CEO Tim Sweeney, however, has already confirmed the AI focus publicly — though he framed it as expansion rather than substitution.

"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," Sweeney wrote on X.

Note the scope of that sentence: not just the Disney project, but all teams using Unreal. If the tooling and workflow changes cascade into the engine group, third-party Unreal developers will feel this too — through tooling changes, documentation priorities and possibly the engine roadmap itself.

Sweeney did not comment on the Disney game's delay.

Why the schedule slipped

The Disney-licensed shooter was already in trouble before AI entered the picture. According to Schreier's sources, Epic underestimated both the time and the headcount the project needed, and production fell behind schedule. The company now hopes AI will help it make up lost time quickly.

So the causal chain runs both ways. The project was late; AI was positioned as the recovery mechanism; adopting it pushed the date back further still, from a fixed March 2027 target to no date at all.

What changes for teams and studios?

For Epic staff, the immediate change is workflow: code comes from models like Claude, humans check and correct it. For the industry, the signal is a top-tier private studio publicly restructuring a marquee licensed project — one carrying Disney's Marvel and Star Wars IP — around AI generation.

Licensed IP adds its own friction. AI-generated code and graphics flowing into a project built on Disney properties raises review questions most studios haven't fully answered, from provenance checks to approval workflows with the licensor.

For developers watching from outside, the practical question is whether Epic's bet pays off: does AI generation actually compress a slipped schedule, or does verification overhead eat the gains? The indefinite release date of the Disney shooter is now the industry's live experiment.

Worth watching: whether Epic publicly dates the project again, and whether the AI-first mandate Sweeney described extends from one title to the broader Unreal ecosystem.