Having done its best to replicate Marvel Studios’ shared universe approach by bringing together the original X-Men and First Class casts for X-Men: Days of Future Past, it now seems that 20th Century Fox could be set to follow Marvel’s expansion onto the small screen. Chatting with Collider, writer and producer Simon Kinberg (Fox’s main man when it comes to the studio’s Marvel properties) has spoken about their desire to build their superhero universe…
“They definitely understand what they have now in a way that – having worked on the X-Men Fox movies since 2003 – [it was a] different regime, really different culture inside the studio [back then], but outside the studio like you say, the juggernauts, the big movies of every summer are [now] superhero movies. We’re gonna have three big superhero movies in the span of like a month and a half between Cap 2, Spider-Man, and us. So Fox does understand that they are sitting on this massive universe with the X-Men, also with Fantastic Four obviously. But they definitely have a sense of it and there’s a real interest and appetite for how to explore and expand that world into other movies, into spinoffs, into different time periods, the whole gamut.”
As for how this might happen, Kinberg admits they could follow the Marvel Studios blueprint by making the leap to the small screen: “We’re still in this place of figuring out what the future of the franchise will be, but when you look at S.H.I.E.L.D. to some extent and what Marvel is doing now with Daredevil and other shows on Netflix, it makes sense to tell some of these stories in TV partly because there’s just not enough screens to do all these characters, and also because the serialized format of comic books is better suited for TV. Because that’s it, every week you come back to the same characters different story, and in comic books every week it’s the same characters, different story. I think what [Fox is] seeing now is with the proliferation of new kinds of visual and special effects, there’s a way to make these stories that doesn’t cost $300 million every time you have to make a huge movie.”
And finally, he also touched upon the long-rumoured Deadpool solo movie, and specifically the chances of it being R-rated: “It makes sense to me. Genuinely it’s early phases, early days, but if you’re gonna do a Deadpool movie, I think you’ve gotta do a hard-R, darker movie and he is the perfect character to do it with.”
How would you like to see Fox expanding its Marvel universe? Let us know in the comments below…
Originally published April 25, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
