It’s been clear for some time now that Marvel won’t be getting back the rights to the X-Men any time soon. 20th Century Fox doesn’t have much in its life, but it does have those characters, and Marvel will have to pry them from the company’s cold, From Justin To Kelly-producing hands. (Now there’s a sequel idea we could all get behind.) And now that the studio is once again setting up Fantastic Four as a big franchise property—assuming the voodoo spell to lift the curse of the previous iteration succeeded—they’re taking a page from the notebook of every other studio in existence and doing that shared universe thing. In a new interview with Yahoo! Movies, director Bryan Singer confirms that a crossover film with the massively successful X-Men series is already in the planning stages.
Those ideas are in play. That would be a natural match-up because they’re both ensemble films and there is a natural mechanism by which to do it… It deals with time. That’s all I’m going to say.
Singer doesn’t say whether he’d be directing, but he does acknowledge that the whole thing is dependent on the success of the upcoming Fantastic Four film. Much like we’d currently be watching The Incredible Hulk 4: Planet Hulk right now if that movie had been a mega-hit, so too do Fox’s dreams of a shared universe depend on people actually wanting to see the characters of that ostensible realm. Meanwhile, Deadpool fidgets impatiently in the foyer.