Fantastic Four hasn’t exactly been doing great things for 20th Century Fox, unlike their other superhero movie property you might have heard of. With Marvel swooping in to rescue Sony from Spider-Woes with their Unstoppable MCU Money Machine, it comes as no surprise that we’re now hearing they’ve extended a helpful hand to another floundering franchise they once licensed out.
And even less surprising, the deal supposedly has a lot to do with the X-Men—specifically that TV version we keep hearing about. Den of Geek, in rumor-y, “unconfirmed anonymous source” fashion, has reported that Marvel has agreed to give Fox the rights to put X-Men on TV in exchange for the rights to bring the Fantastic Four into the MCU.
While Marvel giving up more rights to X-Men in exchange for Fantastic Four might sound ridiculous on the surface, it makes sense from a sort of “take what you can get” angle. X-Men movies have always been strong for Fox, and it’s unlikely they’d ever give up the rights unless something drastic happened, repeatedly, at the box office, which would take years to manifest. So Marvel, with their apparently infinite contingency plans based on which characters they manage to pick up, is plucking some lower hanging fruit in grabbing Fantastic Four in exchange for rights to characters they’ll likely never get to use in movies anyway.
Again, this is all based on a single anonymous source (which Den of Geek is very clear about), and a sequel to this year’s poorly received Fantastic Four is still lined up for Fox, but the deal makes a whole lot of sense from Fox’s angle. Based on how the properties have performed, more X-Men and less Fantastic Four sounds exactly like Hollywood business logic.
The rumor continues that one of Marvel’s recently announced, unnamed movies for release in 2020 will be a Fantastic Four movie, so we’ve likely got a bit of time to wait for solid confirmation. Although, it does seem odd that Marvel would get the rights back and not make a movie for five years when they’ve been pushing other things around (grumble) for Ant-Man sequels and more Spider-Man reboots. Maybe they want to put a nice gap in between this year’s Fantastic Four reboot and the next one? What do you think, gang?
(via Den of Geek)
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