Fans are pleased as punch to hear that it’s only a matter of time that the Fantastic Four and X-Men are returning to Marvel Studios, once everything with the Fox/Disney merger is ironed-out. However, that doesn’t seem to mean that Marvel Studios is looking to rush projects anytime soon. Marvel’s Kevin Feige seems to have given us a reality check and an idea when they’ll actually start planning/developing projects.
In a recent interview with Variety on their podcast Playback, Marvel’s Kevin Feige has seemingly killed all the rumblings of potential X-Men/Fantastic Four cameos for Avengers: Endgame in one brief comment. Suggesting they won’t even be able to start developing projects until the summer (something we’ve been saying for the last year) and that they haven’t even started thinking/planning what to do with the new characters that are coming their way in the near future.
Feige says he hasn’t been given the official green light to start developing stories within the MCU for these characters yet, but he expects to start digging in soon.
“We’ve been told it’s looking very, very good and could happen in the first six months of next year,” Feige says. “The notion of the characters 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. But in terms of actually thinking about it and actually planning things, we haven’t started that yet.”
This likely has to do with them not having the legal ability to develop projects until they’re actually given the go-ahead by the legal department, and despite talk of the US side of the Fox/Disney merger possibly being cleared soon, that doesn’t mean Marvel is rushing things, despite what fans think.
Also, they’re likely waiting for the summer out of respect for Fox’s Dark Phoenix and New Mutants, who have yet to be released but are set for the summer. Not starting until after they’re in theaters prevents sucking up all the oxygen before those movies are released as 20th Century Fox will be part of the family and no longer competition.
Some have assumed or suggested that Avengers: Endgame could be when they throw in the first cameos from the characters, but logistically that seems unlikely due to contracts/casting process unlikely going that route for simple cameos. Fans are obviously going to be gung-ho, but still, need to be patient about this.
SOURCE: VARIETY
