Already happening.
There is certainly a lot of potential to do something with the Kree. Although Agents of SHIELD is barely canon at this point, it did establish that the Kree have a history on Earth, and Captain Marvel makes their influence important in the MCU. Guardians of the Galaxy established them as a force to be reckoned with in Guardians of the Galaxy, and it is very clear with the success of both Guardians films and Thor:Ragnarok, as well as the Avengers conflict with Thanos coming to a head that the future of the MCU is beyond Earth orbit, and possibly beyond space and time.
Frankly, if Marvel Studios can continue to produce movies as inventive and textured as Ragnarok, Guardians, and Black Panther, there is no reason they can’t go on indefinitely as essentially a post-human space opera with fantastical mystical elements from Dr. Strange. One thing that has largely distinguished the MCU offerings from DC and other attempts as superhero franchises such as the uneven X-Men films is that they have allowed each film to have a unique character and ultimately draw from multiple genres such that it isn’t just a collection of superpowered people fighting CGI villains, and even if the film ends in a cliched CGI fight scene with characters fisticuffing one another hundreds of feet in the air while a blue beam shoots into the clouds, there are enough relatable motivations to make the film seem to matter beyond the scope of the plot. DECU films, by contrast, seem to exist purely to fill three acts with mindless and often terrible-looking CGI.
The real conflict in most of the MCU films isn’t the heroes versus some generic bad guy, but conflict within the protagonists themselves. Black Panther ostensibly didn’t even have a real villain in any traditional sense; while Killmonger did some terrible things, he had a solid reason for wanting to control the power of Wakanda even beyond his desire for vengence. Similarly, Spiderman: Homecoming had a bad guy who was created by the indifference of the supposed heroes of the Battle for New York to their impact on the working guy trying to make a living. If the MCU has a genuine master villain (aside from Thanos, who is genuinely “100% a dick”), it is Tony Stark who doesn’t seem to care that every time he solves a problem he creates a bigger one. I could see a film where Stark finally has to come to terms with what an absolute destructive shit he is to everyone around him and goes away. And if Marvel has done nothing else, they have cultivated the art of taking little known, third tier characters, casting unlikely actors as action heroes, and crafting engaging stories around them that are wildly successful beyond any reasonable expectation. At this point, they can retire off the original Avengers once the Thanos storyline goes away and have a broad enough cast to continue doing individual and team movies with different combinations while drawing from their giant vault of secondary characters.
There is already a perfect Fantastic Four film; it’s called The Incredibles and there is no reason to try to reboot it in any other format. The biggest problem with the Fantastic Four is that the origin story is basically nonsensical, the characters are kind of dumb (especially Sue Storm), and it is really tough to care about a guy who is basically the rock monster from Galaxy Quest. Brad Bird fixed all of these problems by ignoring any origin of how the “Specials” get their power or gadgets and adjusted the allocation of powers to fit an actual family dynamic. The only way to make it better is to make a sequel that is comparable to the first one (fingers crossed) so Marvel should just leave well enough alone and stick to making films about Asgardian ‘gods’, mad scientists run amok, cybernetically-enhanced psychotic raccoons, and what happens when Hulk enters the Quantum Realm and has to fight with a rogue Titan who is the size of a neutron.
BTW, I think trying to merge or reboot the X-Men into the MCU is problematic, not so much for origin reasons per se (although it would beg the question of why mutants were not previously known) but because the X-Men are their own brand of world-altering special with a particular dynamic between Professor X and Magneto, while the MCU has established a much larger milieu. Bringing in Spider-Man worked well enough (even though it was essentially tacked on to Civil War) as they took pains to avoid retelling the well-tread origin story and distinguish the MCU Spider-Man from previous versions. (“You know, I’m having a hard time believing she’s someone’s aunt.” “We come in all shapes and sizes, you know.”) But there isn’t a pressing reason to introduce a giant new conflict and collection of characters that has already been exhaustively presented, revised, retro-imagined, time-jumped, killed off, and returned to die again in shockingly terrible ways. It would be like trying to merge the Bond, Bourne, and Austin Powers franchises; discordant and overtread into self-parody, regardless of what you think of the individual series.
Stranger
