Remember a short while back, when every studio in town panicked about Marvel's rise to world domination and decided they had to have a connected movie universe to be successful? It wasn't long after The Avengers became one of the biggest movies of all time.
Back during all that, Fox's solution was rumored to be combining the two Marvel properties it had the rights to: the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. The idea was to have them share a universe and team up from time to time. But months, maybe even years passed, and that report was never followed-up on. Fox released its successful X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past films, rewinding the X-universe to another time to give it a makeover.
Next up is X-Men: Apocalypse, likely to be the last film to incorporate some members of the younger X-Men cast. That'll be here in 2016, while in a matter of days, Fox will release its high-profile Fantastic Four reboot by director Josh Trank.
In a new report out today from Yahoo Movies, X-Men director Bryan Singer is on record as saying that he and Fox are still seriously considering combining the two Marvel franchises. Singer was promoting the just-released X-Men: Days of Future Past - The Rogue Cut, which incorporates seventeen minutes of unused footage back into the original film, when he mentioned the possibility for a crossover.
"Those ideas are in play," Singer told Yahoo. "That would be a natural match-up because they're both ensemble films and there is a natural mechanism by which to do it."
Singer has taken meetings with the creatives at Fox behind the Fantastic Four reboot, and those meetings have progressed at least as far as figuring out how the two teams would intersect, story-wise. All Singer would divulge is that time travel is involved.
The crossover idea is still in the early planning stages, and Singer says it's all contingent on how Apocalypse and Fantastic Four do at the box office.
Fantastic Four arrives in theaters on August 7, 2015. X-Men: Apocalypse hits on May 27, 2016.
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