Despite a report to the contrary surfacing earlier this month, on Thursday, Comcast officially pulled out of the bidding war for the rights to intellectual properties owned by 21st Century Fox – which include Deadpool the Fantastic Four and the X-Men – leaving The Walt Disney Company as the sole competitor vying for the Rupert Murdoch-founded corporation.
However, should the pending amalgamation go through – which, by the way, has already been previously green-lit by the Department of Justice – the aforementioned assets could find themselves incorporated into the highest grossing film franchise of all time: the MCU. And although longtime producer of the mutant brand, and Academy Award nominee, Simon Kinberg has no issue with the integration, he does hope he’s “never” done making X-Men movies.
During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kinberg – who’s worked on nine X-Men features – was asked if the franchise will ever reach a point when it’s too much, and he said the following:
“I hope never. We have found in terms of doing stand-alone movies like Logan and Deadpool that we can smuggle a different genre into the comic book movie. Logan was a Western, and Deadpool was like a Monty Python, R-rated comedy. Genre material has sort of pushed out a lot of drama and comedies. If you can smuggle those kinds of movies into this very digestible genre, then you can have more fun.”
Because Dark Phoenix is on the horizon, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe recently eclipsed the twenty movie mark with Ant-Man and the Wasp, Kinberg was then queried apropos of how concerned he is with the barrier to entry for new fans.
“I feel the obligation is the opposite. It’s not a barrier of entry in terms of catching the audience up, it’s actually a barrier of catching the audience off guard. You want audiences to feel that it’s not the same movie. It is as fresh as any other movie out there, it’s not being compared to previous X-Men movies, it’s being compared to Black Panther, to Avengers, to Arrival, anything within the genre spaces we’re talking about.”
The acquisition of 21st Century Fox by The Walt Disney Company is still in the infancy stage, so we’d be wise not to jump the gun here. That said, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has stated that he possesses “vague dreams and vague ideas” of how he’d consolidate the likes of Deadpool, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men into the MCU. As such, it’s hard not to get overexcited.
Nonetheless, with Dark Phoenix star Sophie Turner eager to become an Avenger, and James Gunn keen on a Guardians of the Galaxy/Deadpool crossover, the impending merger certainly has put a high ceiling on the future of comic book cinema.