Fox Reportedly Adds Six Mystery Marvel Movies to Their Schedule
Although X-Men: Apocalypse and the latest Fantastic Four reboot were fairly notable disappointments for 20th Century Fox, the studio is doing pretty, pretty, prett-ay good in the Marvel department. Thanks to the critical and commercial success of Deadpool and Logan, Fox’s X-universe has been revitalized, and even if the next X-Men movie underperforms, they still have New Mutants, X-Force and Deadpool 2 on the way — and it looks as though that may be the tip of the iceberg.
Fox currently has New Mutants set for April 13, 2018, followed by Deadpool 2 on June 1, 2018, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix on November 2, 2018 — unless one of those dates changes, that’s a fairly ambitious year. When’s the last time a major studio released three films from the same franchise in one year?
Those dates could very well change, as these things can and often do, but scheduling this many superhero blockbusters is a pretty confident move. Fox has been seemingly emboldened by the recent successes of both Deadpool and Logan, and understandably so, but there remains some concern over whether the studio understands exactly what made those films work — it wasn’t just the R ratings, but their respective filmmakers’ subversive, bold approaches to superhero storytelling.
That said, based on what we know about New Mutants, it seems like Josh Boone may be taking a similar approach with his X-Men spinoff. X-Men: Dark Phoenix is…more of a question mark. Series writer and producer Simon Kinberg is directing the project, and while Bryan Singer’s absence could be a good thing (it certainly was for First Class), Kinberg did write Apocalypse.
As for the rest of the dates…One of them obviously belongs to X-Force, an R-rated ensemble set to star Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool and Josh Brolin’s Cable. We can only speculate as to the remaining titles, but since Josh Boone pitched New Mutants as a trilogy, it seems likely that Fox is already making room on their calendar for a sequel. Ditto for a third Deadpool movie. There’s also Channing Tatum’s long-developing Gambit movie, which is still in need of a director. Another possibility? A recent rumor claims that Fox may be considering another reboot of Fantastic Four, potentially changing the setting to the more tonally-appropriate ’60s, which could solve a lot of the problems they’ve encountered in previous attempts.
So we’ve got one definite title and four potential projects — maybe the sixth is another chapter in the main X-Men saga? What do you think?