Hasn’t the ship sort of sailed on any kind of X-Men vs. Avengers movie? Hugh Jackman is done with Wolverine and I would think Thor, Iron Man and Caps actors are reaching the end of the road as far as wanting to go on.
Who wants to watch a recast Logan Vs recast Steve Rogers???
As far as FF…they can always reboot it again…
So they recast roles of older actors. As long as it’s done well, and the films are well-written, what’s the problem? Spider-Man is on his third iteration, and a lot of people are saying it’s his best one yet. The Star Trek crew is on its second set of actors, and James Bond, of course, has been played by six different people. The franchises are still viable.
The MCU is getting crowded as it is. Mutants is a thing that should be in the universe from the start. The MCU is at the point where the scale is going intergalactic and adding mutants at this point would be underwhelming and messy. The whole point of the mutants is that they’re a disruptive element to human civilization but the MCU, with alien invasions, super-heroes, and secret super advanced nations, is beyond that point. The MCU should at this point, for the average citizen, feel like a wildly different place to the real world. The Fox films work (mostly) because they concentrate on one single element, mutants, and their effect on society. In the MCU they’re just one more thing on the pile. Works in comics, not so much in movies.
Also, if you introduce the FF now you either have to explain where they’ve been all this time or do another origin story, which nobody wants. Comic reality can be more loosey goosey with its characters and their capabilities. Can the MCU have two super-geniuses (Stark, Richards) without it being stupid?
Star Trek stripped itself for parts, went with stereotypes (Kirk) over character and fanboyed itself. And had 13 (?) years between movies. Not a shining example.
TBF you didn’t mention X-Men which had mixed success. Magneto and Xavier were well done…the latest recasts in Apocolypse…not so much.
MAINLY my point is this feels 6 years too late. (Missed the boat)
How about this, how would you integrate the MCU, FF and X-Men? FF are easy if they reboot (Who cares)
X-Men? Dunno. Do some kind of universe merge story? Do the M’Kraan Crystal story but with some Avengers also?
Every Fantastic Four movie has stunk on ice. Best thing they could do is to drop that concept down a well and follow it with a truckload of concrete.
Dale Sams:
Well, a reboot is pretty much a given, as it was for Spider-Man. Their origin, though, doesn’t need to be set after the Avengers franchise starts. Ant-Man introduced the idea that there were super-heroes in the MCU operating secretly back in the 80’s, at least, and I understand that the Captain Marvel movie is supposed to be set in the 80’s as well.
Infinity Gauntlet fallout causing powers to emerge in random folks worldwide, maybe? We know that the Infinity Stone in Loki’s staff was used to cause powers to emerge in Wanda and Pietro, so it’s not implausible in the context of the MCU.
I don’t give a shit about the X-Men, keep them separate. What I want in the MCU are Kang, Galactus, Annihilus and the Badoon.
The best superhero movie ever was a Fantastic Four movie. There’s nothing wrong with the concept; the others (you know, the ones that actually had Fantastic Four in the name) were just bad on their own merits.
As for the X-Men, they really don’t work in a shared universe with other superheroes. No, not even in the comics. It doesn’t make sense to see someone doing super-stuff, and everyone has to ask whether they were born that way before deciding whether to hate or love them.
The longest gap between Star Trek movies was seven years, between Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002 and 2009’s Star Trek.
It’s probably too late now – the MCU has been developing without it, and a lot of the best concepts from the FF – the stuff that made it great for me – has been attributed to others and given completely different origins.
I would’ve loved to have seen Galactus (not a goddamn cloud of nanobots, but The Big Guy), and having him slugging it out with The Silver Surfer. Or The Negative Zone and Annhilus, all the cosmic stuff that made the original FF great.
One problem is that the movies did it so badly – they didn’t want to embrace the F deep down, and use their best concepts. Plus, Pixar had already done the Fantastic Four first, and better. Elastic Lass embodied the stretchable superhero perfectly in the way they ought to move and react. Mr. Fantastic, in any of the incarnations, never came close. The Incredibles nailed the Family Interaction and Dynamic perfectly, and none of the FF movies did.
I’ve read a bit of F4, but my brother is a huge F4 fan, and he says that the best way to think about the good F4 comic stories is like Star Trek TNG – a group of friends and heroes going on adventures into the unknown, protecting the innocent and solving mysteries, with recurring villains like Doctor Doom popping up periodically. He thinks it would work best as a TV show.
Unbreakable is a Fantastic Four movie??? I need to wrap my head around this. So Nick Fury is in a wheelchair…
If I can ask a completely pointless question here–when did people start abbreviating the Fantastic Four as F4? When I was a kid, we called them the FF. And we liked it that way! What’s with this F4 stuff?
Not to pick on iiandyiiii–a lot of people do this–but it’s something that bugs me.
And by the way, get off my lawn!
If you’re referring to The Incredibles, I disagree. The Incredibles is a great movie but, replication of some core powers and number of members aside (well, not even that if you count the baby), it’s not really a Fantastic Four movie. Different personalities, different catalysts, different dynamics.
If you’re referring to something else, it’s lost on me.
Actual Fantastic Four has been terrible though. They can keep trying to reboot it in a desperate attempt to make us care about Richards & Co but the IP feels toxic at this point from a cinematic standpoint. Ditch it and move on. Richards and his crew don’t have anything so unique or interesting to bring us that we need to keep spinning our wheels on them.
That’s probably the first time I’ve ever written about them, so I was just guessing as to the abbreviation.
The MCU (at least the TV arm of it) has spent so much time replacing all the beats Mutants normally fill with Inhumans that at this point adding Mutants would be awkward at best. If they did bring the X-Men in they would probably be better off adding the concept of alternate Earths. Hell having Reed Richards (native to the X-Men Earth in this scenario) open the portal is a perfect way of introducing him.
They were searching the Cosmos for Galactus, hoping to convince them it’s in his interest to stop Thanos. Where was Dr. Doom all this time, though?
Fin Fang Foom, True Believer!
I don’t really see that this is so hard. They’re going to have to switch focus soon anyway. The big MCU players are getting some miles on them and Marvel has near endless content to pull from.
End the Avengers focus and switch to X-Men or Fantastic Four worlds for a while. Four Avengers movies will be enough, won’t it? Go forward with Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange and so forth and center them around the FF and eventually the mutants. It’ll be 30 years before they have to get back to the Avengers.
I have noticed that cartoon characters like Bugs and Daffy tend to get younger as they age, so that they can be marketed to new generations of merchandise-consuming viewers who will grow up with them like their parents did with the earlier versions. This seems likely to happen with MCU characters as well, if only for practical reasons (i.e., actors age).
I still can’t believe they haven’t gone forward with a Stilt-Man feature or series. Seems like a sure winner.
And what about the Skrulls? Marvel has always maligned their glories and triumphs, printing numerous hate tracts against them full of lies and slander. The Skrulls are a peace-loving race destined to rule the multiverse. Yet, they too have been written out of the movies. How many more indignities must they endure?
BTW, I am not a Skrull, nor a paid agent working on behalf of the Skrull Empire…although it’s true I sometimes volunteer.
On the plus side, the MCU would get the good Quicksilver.