With the media deal of the century that was the Disney-Fox merger, the Big Six of Hollywood were reduced to the Big Five, with Fox selling its assets in its entirety to Disney Studios for a sum of $52.4 billion. As the merger goes through, Disney aims to become the largest production house in human history and an information superpower. That much power under one private entity is frightening and terrifying.
While Disney only bought Fox for its valuable Intellectual Property assets and distribution rights which includes one of the most lucrative and profitable franchises of Hollywood, one can’t fail to notice the Mouse House’s increasing power within the movie making industry and beyond. This means that the MCU will have even more characters as Fox’s Mutants are going to join the likes of Captain America!
Fox has invested considerable time and effort in developing a franchise solely on the basis if the X-men and other borrowed characters from the Marvel comic universe. People always awe at the huge movie franchise and Goliath that the MCU has become. The general public considers the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be the epitome of superhero movie making. Those that disagree hail the Nolan Batman trilogy as supreme. All these “comic fans” to take into account the efforts made by fox to keep its X-men series alive.
Despite being a hit or miss with the fans, the X-men movies carved a niche with the moviegoers where the nerds of the world welcomed an X-men movie now and then littered with comic references and characters we all love. These films established Hugh Jackman as the WOLVERINE OF THE MODERN NERD and gave us a definite idea of what a shared universe may look like. A fact that seems apparent to fox.
The studio has given us some memorable movies with these Marvel characters including Deadpool and Logan. It has also ruined a couple of plotlines with movies such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
With this merger as mentioned above, The X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Deadpool properties will be coming under Disney who owns the Marvel Studios as well. So Marvel will finally be able to bring the former Fox properties into the MCU. The deal has been announced, but it will be finished till the mid-2019, so there are still 12-14 months until the X-Men and Fantastic Four finally come home.
That seems to be the master plan of the suits at Disney, the plan to finish up with Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 3 by the time they are able to hammer out the contractual details with Fox Studios. This means that after Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers 4, Antman & Wasp and Captain Marvel, the studio will most likely look towards the acquired characters to develop the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4.
Until that time, Disney will be done with Avengers 4 and the entire Phase 3 and will be looking to launch an entirely new Phase into the MCU, and that may be the perfect time to introduce the Former Fox Marvel properties into the MCU.
Since the mutants were not a part of the MCU in any way till now, it will be really difficult to suddenly bring up mutants out of nowhere. MCU is a universe where we have seen the Inhumans be used in place of mutants as the Inhumans are pretty similar to the Mutants, having the Inhuman genes present in their bodies which manifest overtime or with a Terrigen Crystal used to bring out the abilities within an Inhuman. Consequently, the mutants of the Marvel universe are identified by the existence of the X-gene.
It will be really interesting to see how Marvel brings in Mutants into the MCU once the Merger happens successfully. One popular theory that currently prevails is that as the Multiverse will probably be introduced in Avengers 4, and that is how Marvel could bring in an entirely different Earth that has the Mutants and the X-Gene present within the people that reside on that Earth.
But the need of a crossover event later on in the MCU could be way too out of motive and Arrowverse-like if that happens, so it is important that we have mutants exist within the same Earth that the MCU has explored till now.
The second theory is that since the MCU will totally change after Avengers 4, people are expecting that Avengers 4 will write a new reality itself using the Reality Stone, or it will go so far back in time using the Time Stone to completely alter the timeline and alter what all has happened in the MCU till now. But that will become too Days of Future Past like and it will erase all the great movies and origins that the MCU has produced in its years of establishment, essentially debunking the entire established universe so that cannot happen as well.
So, what could the MCU do that makes the Mutants home-coming in a bit original and different from what Fox has done with X-Men and also in a way that the entire story feels believable. The solution to all these problems could be ‘The Ultimates Comic’ series of the X-Men. For those of you who don’t know what happened in this series, the comic explored a totally different way to the origin of the Mutants. It said that Mutants were not a natural part of the world, and they were rather created by experiments done by men.
This could be a great inspiration for the MCU as they could tie everything back to Captain America during the World War. Imagine a scenario where the USA after seeing a successful Steve Rogers experiment decide to make Super Soldiers of their own and in pursuit of that, they try to experiment on countless humans throughout the world by picking up potential subjects. And since they did not have the expertise of the German Doctor Erskine, so all their experiments failed, but these experiments were able to physically alter the genes of these subjects, adding the “X-Gene” into their body which was passed on throughout generations by these subjects as they lived their lives, and now, these genes have started to manifest in the decedents of these subjects.
In a similar way, Erik Lehnsherr aka Magneto could be a German Super soldier experiment and that is how he came to become Magneto in the recent times. Remember, that Hulk and Abomination in the MCU are also products of the Super Soldier experiments, as Bruce Banner was working on the Super Soldier serum, and he got mixed up with the Gamma-ray exposure. All this could really work in the MCU and explain the existence of the Mutants and the X-Gene really well.
The Ultimates comics were by no degree a commercial or a critical success. But the basic premise of the comic does give the writers at Disney a viable proposition to introduce the X-gene and mutants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The very idea that the time and reality stones could be used in a way that alters the timeline of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe is absurd and unbelievable but it is highly probable that after the completion of Phase three, Marvel chooses to build the foundations towards X-men.
The very idea that a new team of super beings takes over the protection of the either continued or an altered timeline of the Marvel cinematic universe suggest that the Fox-Disney merger is much more important than readily apparent to the layman. However, no matter how much us fans squirms and beg the entire process will take some time to complete. Whenever there is that much money involved, suits take time to hammer out the perfect deal. With the advent of the merger, however, fans can rest assured that we will see the X-men take their rightful place beside other characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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In the end, it seems that selling the rights to X-men to Fox ended up being beneficial for Marvel as they will now have a plethora of new comic material to delve into once the characters return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (maybe with the help of the Super Soldier Serum). The Ultimates comics were criticised a lot but they could work in the MCU, so let’s see how things go. For now, let’s just hope that the deal goes through smoothly.
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