Well now that Fox has been acquired by Disney, their Marvel properties could be brought into a well-established Marvel Cinematic Universe. But given the fact that they own so many characters and haven’t really used them all to perfection does tell you a story of how they’ve wasted so much potential. To be fair, seeing how the MCU prospered, Fox did start to do some great things with their properties in their last few years of independence.
The leak of that Deadpool footage really broke the shackles for their Superhero properties. Until Deadpool came out, it was all just about the X-Men. Then when Deadpool being produced at such a low budget turned out to be a massive profit story, Fox started to understand the game up to a certain extent. They understood how they could make the best of their characters.
The last two X-Men movies (Apocalypse & Dark Phoenix) have not been what they should have because, without Wolverine, the films just lacked the charm. But full marks to them for at least trying. They had a Gambit movie in motion and it’s a bummer that the film couldn’t lift off. But after their many failures with the likes of Daredevil, Fantastic Four and a few other X-Men films, they did learn a lesson. To do justice with their characters they put films like the Silver Surfer and Doctor Doom in development. And all that is a good thing. Even the first trailer of New Mutants had the fans really excited.
But all of this is a thing of the past now. No one can’t deny the fact that we live in an era where the Avengers rule, and they are everything to the audience. Fox could have done the same for their characters, but they could only make things good for Wolverine and Deadpool.
As it turns out, they actually had a massive plan to make a movie including every property that they owned nearly a decade ago. It did not happen due to a scheduling conflict, but Fox would have brought all of their big name Superheroes together.
Kevin Smith’s Fatman Beyond podcast had the writer of Rim of the World, Thor, and X-Men: First Class, Zack Stentz on the show. He revealed the fact that he had submitted a script for the aforementioned ensemble. He said:
“My ex-partner and I, when we were working at Fox and we were working on X-Men: First Class, we did a secret movie for them that, I can’t tell you what the plot was, but I can tell you that it used all of the characters, all of the Marvel characters that Fox had at the time in 2011. It used the X-Men. It used the Fantastic Four. It used Daredevil. It used Deadpool. Daredevil was still at Fox at the time. We almost had Paul Greengrass directing it which would’ve been so cool but he had another project to do instead. It didn’t end up going but it was a script I was really proud of and it would’ve been really good.
This was at Fox in 2011, which doesn’t really exist anymore, so maybe they won’t sue me for revealing. Even though, I didn’t reveal what it was called.”
After this was done, there was another attempt at creating something like this again. Stentz continued:
“The other thing that’s never going to happen is the version that Ash and I did of the Fantastic Four. Josh Trank, who ended up doing the Fantastic Four that we saw in the theaters, we were supposed to be writing the script for him but nobody told him that we were doing it. So, when he officially signed on he was like, ‘Why are you imposing these other writers on me? I want to use my own writer. I wanna do my own script.’ And he did his version instead. It was one of those hammer blows to our career at the time, even though we had gotten paid, because I was so freakin’ proud of that script. It was how the Fantastic Four were almost the Fantastic Five except a young man named Victor von Doom was just too damaged and f—ed up to be part of them. It was a script I was very proud of. Josh Trank didn’t wanna do it.”
Well, the Fox characters have got a better deal now as they could interact with big name MCU characters. So all’s well that ends well!
