Disney’s buyout of Fox is set to change everything on the Marvel movie front, as the deal will mean that Marvel Studios will have access to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four for the first time. Despite fans being desperate to know how the multiple franchises will be blended into one, both studios are maintaining that the repercussions of the merger are too far away to think about at the moment.
That’s definitely the approach producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker, two of the architects of the X-Men franchise, are taking. While speaking with Collider, Kinberg – also the writer and director of Dark Phoenix – explained that all he knows is that they’re still plowing ahead with working on the X-films currently on their slate without worrying about what the Disney buyout will mean.
“The status [of the deal] I won’t speak to because that’s above my pay grade, but we’re just continuing to make movies that we make and developing movies that we’ve been developing for years now, like Gambit, or finishing movies like New Mutants and Dark Phoenix and Deadpool, that comes out this Christmas, and others, MultipleMan, other movies we’ve been working on we continue to work on.”
Parker then talked about the situation from a business standpoint. He made the good point that, until the deal’s complete, Fox needs to proceed like any other business and keep up its profits – which means making new movies – just as if it wasn’t being snapped up by Disney. In Parker’s words, it’s still “business as usual.”
“Until the deal is completely finished—which has in principal terms been agreed to by the two boards but it hasn’t yet gone through the final approvals that go through the government. But until that’s done, Fox has to remain Fox and perform as it would as if it wasn’t up for sale. So for all intents and purposes you proceed as business as usual.”
So, as things stand, Fox has Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants due for release next year. The former’s complete while the latter still needs to go back for reshoots. Gambit, meanwhile, looks to be finally gearing up for its shoot, while Multiple Man appears to be much earlier in the pre-production process. Finally, a PG-13 re-release of Deadpool 2 is also coming this Christmas.
If the estimates that the deal between the two studios will be complete by mid 2019 are correct, that means that Disney will likely continue work on these X-Men movies – which may cause complications if the two universes are to be made into one. But hey, apparently that’s a problem for another day.