Fox managed to churn out thirteen X-Men movies over the course of 20 years, and the various sequels, reboots and spinoffs combined to earn more than $6 billion at the box office, which makes the merry band of mutants the stars of the seventh highest-grossing franchise in history. The blockbusters may have varied wildly in quality, but you can’t fault their commercial success.
However, the studio found it a lot trickier to adapt the other superheroes at their disposal for the big screen, with Tim Story’s tedious duology and Josh Trank’s disastrous reboot doing the standing of the Fantastic Four no favors, while they were also responsible for Ben Affleck’s Daredevil and Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, the latter of which set the female-driven comic book movie back by over a decade alongside Halle Berry’s infamous Catwoman.
At one stage, Fox were considering the idea of an X-Men vs. Fantastic Four crossover, one that would have been influenced by the Civil War story arc long before Marvel Studios adopted it as the basis for their third Captain America film, and Paul Greengrass has now revealed that he held talks with the studio about tackling the ambitious project.
“They did talk to me about it. I wouldn’t say I was attached to it. I thought about it. I think in the end, I slightly felt like, maybe those movies, I wasn’t right for those kinds of movies.”
Greengrass had an undeniable impact on action cinema after directing The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, but his signature shaky cam style definitely wouldn’t have been a good fit for an epic like X-Men vs. Fantastic Four. He’s adopted a more traditional visual approach for his latest effort News of the World, but having previously flirted with Watchmen before Zack Snyder steered it out of development hell, the Captain Phillips and United 93 filmmaker seems fully aware that mega budget comic book movies wouldn’t be the best use of his talents.