Fan Fest News

News for Fans, By Fans!

Marvel’s Kevin Feige Reveals Big ‘X-Men’ and ‘Fantastic Four’ Update

Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has provided some new insight into the future of the X-Men and Fantastic Four in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Feige sat down with Variety’ Kris Tapley on the Playback Podcast, where they mainly discussed the success of Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War.
 He told Tapley that he and Marvel Studios may possibly begin working on the two franchises in the first half of 2019.

“We’ve been told it’s looking very, very good and could happen in the first six months of next year. 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.”

Fox has had X-Men and Fantastic Four films on hold, but after the recent acquisition affecting Fox properties, Disney and Marvel now have access to the two popular franchises. The most popular characters in them include Wolverine, Cyclops, Magneto, Professor X, Doctor Doom, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, and the Fantastic Four. Kevin Feige’s involvement in the projects make prime the possibility of those characters fighting alongside the likes of Black Panther, Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and the Guardians of The Galaxy.

The one negative that would come with this revamp, is that a re-casting would likely take place. Fox still has two X-Men films in the making, including X-Men: Dark Phoenix and New Mutants.
Sophie Turner will star as Dark Phoenix again, and her story will continue the latest team of X-Men who first appeared in X-Men: First Class. Magneto, Professor X, Mystique, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Beast, and Quicksilver will all be featured in that film.
There is a chance that director Simon Kinberg has spoken with Feige about keeping the cast, which includes James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, January Jones and Nicholas Hoult.
Speaking with CinePop in 2018, he expressed his hope for Dark Phoenix to be the beginning of a new era for the crew.

“I see it as a new chapter. I see it as taking the franchise in a different direction tonally. And that doesn’t mean that the next one will have the same tone, it just means that the next one can have a different tone. I think for many years, the X-Men, Bryan [Singer] really transformed the superhero genre in 2000 or 2001 when the first one came out. That’s almost 20 years ago. It is a long time ago. And at that time, superhero movies were not wildly popular, actually. There had been a few failures in the mid-90s, and there hadn’t been a lot of superhero movies, if any, around that time and X-Men sort of was revolutionary in its moment. But that was 20 years ago and I think, I really felt like it time to really change the look, the feel, the tone, the vibe of these movies. And that doesn’t mean this is the one going forward, it just means that if it’s me or whoever directs the next one, you can make it different, and you have to make it different.”

Do you think this is the first step to the X-Men joining the MCU?

Dark Phoenix hits theaters in June 2019.