In case you thought Disney and Marvel were the only studios scheduling interconnected films years in advance, 20th Century Fox would like to change your mind.
As reported Thursday by Crave film site Comic Book Movie, Fox rolled out a far-reaching slate of upcoming projects, featuring 2017 installments for Wolverine and the Fantastic Four as well as a summer 2018 mystery Marvel project.
Director James Mangold will follow up on The Wolverine with another solo outing for Logan on March 3, 2017. That film is expected to play off the events Wolverine and his fellow mutants will face in X-Men: Days of Future Past (debuting May 23) and its own successor X-Men: Apocalypse (May 27, 2016).
Meanwhile, even though casting has yet to wrap up on director Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four reboot shooting this summer, Fox is apparently bullish on the franchise’s prospects, slotting Fantastic Four 2 for July 14, 2017.
And those tricky suits at Fox are dangling even more red meat in front of the Marvel-crazy legions, scheduling an unannounced Marvel film on July 13, 2018. In the event you’d like to place any bets on this one (and why the hell wouldn’t you?), the safest bets are the X-Force film Mark Millar was talking about last summer or even the much-discussed X-Men-Fantastic Four crossover flick that’s also been bouncing around the rumor bin for a while now.
So if you harbored any fanboy dreams that the FF and X-franchises might collapse, allowing the properties to return to Marvel and be re-absorbed into their exploding Avenger-verse…well, I’ll take a hit of what you’re having…
