It looks as though Disney‘s buyout of 21st Century Fox, including the 20th Century Fox film studio, may be completed by as early as January. As such, Disney’s Marvel Studios is looking to start developing projects using the Marvel Comics characters whose film rights were held by Fox, i.e. all characters associated with the ‘X-Men’ and ‘Fantastic Four’ brands. (Side note, this includes the character Kang, a time traveler that was part of Marvel’s plans *cough* ‘Avengers: Endgame’ *cough* until they discovered he was off-limits.) And according to Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, Marvel may start working on ‘X-Men’ and ‘Fantastic Four’ projects within the first half of next year.
While appearing on the 100th episode of the podcast, Playback with Kris Tapley, Feige reflected on the first ten years of Marvel Studios and vaguely discussed future plans. When asked if Marvel Studios was planning what to do with these characters, he said:
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“No, not yet, but we’ve been told it’s looking very, very good and could happen in the first six months of next year … The notion of the characters that had previously been under a Fox agreement coming back is great. It’s nice when a company that created all these characters can have access to all those characters. It’s unusual not to; Marvel’s been in a unique position to not have access to those characters for a long time … But in terms of actually thinking about it and actually planning things, we haven’t started that yet.”
So while fans can look forward to seeing the X-Men and Fantastic Four in Marvel movies, it doesn’t look like it will be for a few years, as they haven’t even begun planning. There had been rumors that Fox would not wind up releasing the already mostly completed movies ‘Dark Phoenix‘ and ‘New Mutants‘ because Marvel wanted a clean slate, but there’s no reason not to release them when those properties won’t be revisited on screen again for years.
If you want to listen to all of Feige’s discussion, you can check it out below:
How would you like to see the X-Men and Fantastic Four worked into the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
Jax's earliest memory is of watching 'Batman,' followed shortly by a memory of playing Batman & Robin with a friend, which entailed running outside in just their underwear and towels as capes. When adults told them they couldn't run around outside in their underwear, both boys promptly whipped theirs off and ran around in just capes.
