With “Dark Phoenix” landing with a resounding thud with critics and fans, all eyes are on Marvel Studios to fix these Fox heroes they’ve inherited. However, when you hear Kevin Feige talk about these Fox/Marvel characters that he now controls, it seems as if there’s still a lot of unknowns.
And when he spoke recently to Fandango, he illustrated that he’s treating the X-Men and Fantastic Four characters as he would any of the other hundreds of characters he has in his stable. He’s going to use them when it makes sense for the story. Maybe that means introducing them in solo films or as supporting players in another film.
Feige was specifically asked if he thought that the way Marvel Studios introduced Spider-Man and Black Panther in “Captain America: Civil War” would work for this new batch of heroes.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “You know, oftentimes it just comes down to a specific character in a specific story and a specific way to introduce them.”
He continued, “So sometimes, like with Spider-Man and Black Panther, that made sense. Then, other times, with characters like Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Thor, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man… it’s fun to introduce them in their own movies first. So it just depends on the story we’re trying to tell.”
As for when fans might actually get to see the X-characters and the Fantastic Four in the MCU, it sounds like there’s no official plan right now. However, as Feige said, there’s a lot to discuss and a lot of scenarios that can play out.
“It’s still early days, but it’s been a fun exercise, and it’s one, by the way, that we’ve been doing for years,” said Feige. “Every development meeting starts with cool ideas and fun ideas, and our wheels are always turning in terms of what if… to use a Marvel publishing term.”
He added, “What if we did this? What if we did that? What if we had access to such and such characters? That’s how ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ came together in the first place, and it’s fun to now be in this position with the Fox characters, too, because if we come up with a great ‘What If’ we can actually do it.”
Unfortunately, for people eager to see these Fox characters be introduced, it would appear that we’re still years away from this becoming a reality. For as fast as Marvel Studios is at pumping out films, the studio is far from superhuman. It sounds like we might see individual heroes introduced as supporting characters in other films before a full ‘X-Men’ or ‘Fantastic Four’ film is released.
For now, fans should expect a lot of the Marvel Studios goodness you’ve come to love in the last decade. And eventually, that will include the X-Men and Fantastic Four.