Last month, the Disney/Fox deal finally came into effect, giving Marvel Studios access to an overwhelming array of new comic book properties. And while a lot of fans are keen to see what Kevin Feige and his team does with the X-Men, a new piece from ComicBook.com makes a convincing case that we’re likely to see the Fantastic Four in the MCU first.
For one thing, Fox’s take on the mutant saga still has a couple of movies left to go. First is Dark Phoenix, which is scheduled to hits theaters on June 7th of this year, before The New Mutants comes out on some unknowable date. After that, you can imagine that Marvel will want the franchise to cool off for a little while before they start recasting, whereas the Fantastic Four haven’t made their way to theaters since Josh Trank’s 2015 box office bomb.
Another point of note is that Marvel Comics has now re-launched their line of Fantastic Four books, which could arguably be taken as a sign that Marvel Studios has plans for a movie. On top of that, there’s the simple fact that Marvel’s First Family seems far easier to integrate into the MCU than the X-Men.
After all, Professor Xavier’s team emerged from a widespread fictional phenomenon of people being born with incredible abilities. That takes time to establish in a universe that has yet to feature its first proper mutant. The origins of the Fantastic Four, on the other hand, needn’t be any more complicated than your classic case of a few individuals gaining their powers from a single incident.
All in all, we’d certainly place our money on seeing the next Mister Fantastic before the next Wolverine, though Kevin Feige recently suggested that it could be “a very long time” before any Fox properties land their own film. In the meantime, Avengers: Endgame is set to bring the saga’s current era to a close when it comes out on April 26th.