Following the company’s acquisition of Fox, The Walt Disney Company was able to secure a massive volume of titles that would help bolster the libraries of both Disney Plus and Hulu, including a string of superhero movies from the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises.
The older movies were lumped together as part of the Marvel Legacy Collection, just to make it perfectly clear that they don’t exist in the same space as Kevin Feige’s shared universe, and the recently signed streaming deal with Sony also ensures that Tom Holland’s Homecoming and No Way Home will be making their way to the platform eventually.
However, the world of licensing and distribution arrangements for the various streaming services is as complicated as it is convoluted, with Tim Story’s Fantastic Four now no longer available to Disney Plus subscribers in the United States, but it’s now streaming on Peacock even though NBCUniversal weren’t involved in the painfully mediocre 2005 blockbuster at all.
Admittedly, not a lot of fans will be mourning the loss of the film, which did decent business at the box office after earning $333 million at the box office, but received a much more muted response from critics and general audiences. Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans were both great in their respective roles, but Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba were horribly miscast, while some of the visual effects most definitely do not hold up when viewed through a modern lens.
It’ll be years before the entire roster of Marvel Studios, Fox and Sony superhero stories will all be together in the same place, but with so many feature films and TV shows on the way throughout Phase Four, the MCU has more than enough content to compensate.
