When Bryan Singer announced not just the presence of Quicksilver, but the casting of his character yesterday, it shocked people. Well, it shocked people who heard about it. And who also know that Joss Whedon has confirmed that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are going to be in The Avengers 2. And who also know that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are mutants. And who also know that mutant characters were thought to all have been licensed to Fox.
So it shocked, well, some, who wondered whether this was the first salvo in a legal battle over who has the licensing rights to a couple of characters who are equally mutants and Avengers, or even whether this was the first unlooked for sign of a possible crossover between the X-Men movie continuity and the Marvel Cinematic universe.
The answer is apparently definitely not on the latter, and yeah, kinda, on the former. At least according to HitFix:
What we’re going to see is a legally-negotiated stand-off in which we’ll get two totally different versions of one character. While they may act like things are amicable in public, HitFix sources say otherwise.
Even without confirmation this doesn’t seem very unlike to me. There have been indications here and there from folks who would know the exact details of Fox’s licensing agreement with Marvel (like Marvel Entertainment head Kevin Feige) that the two characters in in the grey area between secondary X-Men characters and secondary Avengers characters. Granted, the Marvel Comics universe is one where almost everybody has been on the Avengers at some point (I think I might have been on the Avengers for a month in 2002), but Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were a full half of the second Avengers team alongside Captain America and Hawkeye, and though they are the mutant children of Magneto, have always stayed pretty distant from the X-Men. If they’re in that grey area, it’s likely that who gets to make a movie with them boils down to two options: either who ever does the character first, gets them, or each company can just make their own versions.
It’s possible that this is why Whedon and Feige have been talking about involving the two in The Avengers 2 so early, to gain some primacy on the idea, in which case, Fox following up on it with their own version of the character just makes savvy business sense. The Avengers is the third highest grossing film in history; every character in its sequel is going to be getting a lot of attention. Why wouldn’t Fox want to muscle in on that merchandising bandwagon, if only to pick up sales from folks looking for the Avengers version of a Quicksilver action figure, anyway?
(via Blastr.)
