The first official project starring these characters was announced at Disney Investor Day, with Jon Watts set to direct the MCU’s Fantastic Four movie. Plans for the X-Men are still in the works.
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In a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast, director Paul Greengrass spoke on plans for a Marvel crossover movie with the properties previously owned by 20th Century Fox.
“They [Fox] did talk to me about it. I wouldn’t say I was attached to it… I thought about it. I think in the end… I slightly felt like, maybe those movies, I wasn’t right for those kinds of movies.”
The X-Men movies turned into a major franchise that lasted nearly two decades, with iconic characters like Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier, and Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool leading 13 movies. Fox’s Fantastic Four had far less success, releasing three movies from two separate franchises between 2005 and 2015, all of which arrived to widely mixed reactions.
The “X-Men vs. Fantastic” scrapped film was reportedly set to pit the mutants against Marvel’s First Family while also bringing in other characters like Daredevil and Deadpool, who were previously owned by Fox. Planned before Josh Trank’s Fan4stic, the movie would have introduced its own version of the Superhero Registration act and incited Fox’s version of Captain America: Civil War with the characters they owned.
These two franchises going head-to-head in their own movie would have certainly been a blockbuster event comparable to the MCU’s Avengers movies. Thankfully, an event like this can now be set alongside those same Avengers movies as nearly all Marvel entities but Spider-Man and related characters are under the Disney umbrella.
There are no set plans for an MCU-based X-Men movie, while Jon Watts’ Fantastic Four is confirmed with no release date.
