This article gets a little breathlessly geeky in places, but there’s no doubt that the folk running Marvel Pictures right now are salivating over finally getting their hands on the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises — heroes and villains alike.
If they follow their pattern, we’ll see stand-alone films there before any serious integration with the rest of the MCU, though cameos are possible, a la Spider-Man in Civil War. And that’s fine — fitting them into phase 4 and phase 5 is going to be tricky enough without moving too fast.
This also gives Marvel/Disney some greater flexibility with their original core heroes aging out or retiring from their roles. “What the heck do we do with the Avengers if Iron Man, Cap, Thor, and Hulk are all gone?” is a little less urgent a question when there are these additional characters to play with.
For me, what I’m most looking forward to is Ike Perlmutter and Marvel Comics deciding it’s okay to have a Fantastic Four comic book again. The FF’s substantive absence from the Marvel Universe has been unusually refreshing in some ways, but knowing it was driven by Perlmutter not wanting to promote characters showing up in Fox movies was particularly maddening. Those days should be drawing to a close soon.
