Speaking yesterday with investors, Disney CEO Bob Iger offered some more insight into the company’s plans for their newly acquired properties. While most people didn’t really think Marvel Studios would sit on their hands after acquiring the live-action rights to the X-Men, Fantastic Four and related characters, some pundits have maintained that the characters, especially the X-Men, would stay in their own sandbox. Iger doesn’t agree:
We’re also looking forward to expanding the Marvel Cinematic Universe to include X-Men, Fantastic Four and Deadpool. Basically Fox — 20th Century Fox Studios — has some interesting tentpole opportunities, we obviously are going to continue to support that. What they’ve done obviously with Avatar, and what they did with Deadpool, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Planet of the Apes is another one. We’ll stay in that business. Not all of it will be branded anything other than what it’s branded today, as a for instance. How much we will create under that banner, we’re still uncertain. It’s going to take a while from a regulatory perspective. They’ll continue to develop in that period of time and at such time as we close this deal and have control, we’ll take stock and really look carefully at what their slate looks like going forward and how many movies it would make sense to make.
And so it seems that for the time being, Fox will proceed as usual with films like X-Men: Dark Phoenix, New Mutants, Deadpool 2 and maybe even Gambit and X-Force. However, once the deal has been approved and Disney takes full ownership of Fox’s studios (potentially 12-18 months from now), we are likely to see Disney hand creative control over these properties to Kevin Feige.
To that end, another report cites that unnamed “insiders” are already hearing that combining the new properties with the robust planned MCU slate could come at the expense of some of Fox’s future plans. Future New Mutants films and other X-films in development (an X-23 spinoff was mentioned) could potentially be pushed to Disney’s upcoming streaming platform while Feige focuses on giving the X-Men and Fantastic Four (and their incredible villains) the treatment they deserve. So while we may never get to see that Multiple Man film, it seems like we might have a chance of seeing Spidey sit on a rooftop with the Human Torch or see Reed Richards talk science with T’Challa. Guess it’s a little give and take.
