Is A Fantastic Four/X-Men Crossover Film In The Works?

File this one strictly under rumor until we hear otherwise, but Latino-Review is reporting that 20th Century Fox has been keeping its eyes wide open with regard to Marvel and DC’s team-up movies, and execs there are looking to do something similar by throwing together its X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises into one Avengers-style event.

The author of the piece says that Fox’s plans for a 2018 X-Men release are currently far from set in stone – because studio execs are mulling the possibility of uniting the Fantastic Four and the X-Men on screen. This would be dependent on Josh Trank’s troubled reboot of Fantastic Four not getting savaged by critics or dying a slow and painful death at the big-leagues box office (The Amazing Spider-Man 2-style) and on the X-Men lineup still being recognizable enough to serve as a major draw for audiences even without Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine ranking among them.

If those two pieces fall into place, the 2018 film could bring the cast of Trank’s Fantastic Four – including Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell – together with some of the new X-Men. Based on the events of Days of Future Past, those X-Men could include Anna Paquin’s Rogue, Shawn Ashmore’s Iceman, Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde, Kelsey Grammer’s Beast, Halle Berry’s Storm, Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey, James Marsden’s Cyclops and Patrick Stewart’s Professor X (the cast of the prequels would probably stay rooted in the past, because sending the Fantastic Four back through time seems like even more of a stretch).

Regardless, I still don’t buy this. Trank’s Fantastic Four has none of the goodwill heading into Comic-Con that it would need to make an X-Men crossover something fans even want to see, and the X-Men franchise is already getting messy in terms of continuity with the reset Days of Future Past timeline, new spinoffs like Gambit and the time-traveling X-Men: Apocalypse on the horizon. Outside of just wanting to make more money, there’s no sound reason for Fox to go the crossover route just yet – let’s just hope that they’ll think about than just the box office receipts.