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Credit: Inside the MagicMarvel Studios has pinned a lot of hopes on The Fantastic Four, but it turns out that the movie will not be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at all. As always, it turns out that it’s most likely Deadpool’s fault.
The MCU, Diminishing Returns, and the End of Sequels
For close to two decades now, the MCU has dominated the global box office like no franchise before or since. The seismic impact of Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark in Iron Man (2008) is still being felt in pop culture, with every new MCU movie and streaming show being anticipated months or years ahead of time.
But not even the MCU is immune to the ravages of time, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has found himself back on his heels for the first time after two sustained years of diminishing box office returns and rising critical backlash. The cracks first began showing in Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), which made decent grosses but could not match the sky-high expectations put on director Taika Waititi after Thor: Ragnarok (2017); when a movie is considered a mild failure because it didn’t crack the billion-dollar mark, you know a franchise is in trouble.
Things have rapidly gotten worse for Kevin Feige and his Disney bosses, as the much-touted Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), which was promoted as the introduction of the post-Thanos MCU Big Bad, Kang (Jonathan Majors) and the cinematic kickoff of its new Multiverse Saga. Unfortunately, bad word of mouth and negative reactions to the CGI-heavy film killed it at the box office, and the third Ant-Man film gave the studio one of the franchise’s worst second-week dropoffs to date. The Chicago Tribune seems to have spoken for the culture at large, saying that the “earlier films’ throwaway jokes and welcome aversion to brutal solemnity have largely been ditched in favor of endless endgame stuff and weirdly cheesy digital world-building in the Quantum Realm.”
Related: MCU Star Gets Second Chance, Could Play Doctor Doom in ‘Fantastic Four’ Reboot
But by the end of the year, Marvel would have killed to have the box office numbers of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The Marvels (2023), starring Brie Larson as Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau, and Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel is the MCU’s biggest financial disaster to date, not even recouping its $270 million production budget (not to mention that advertising probably took tens of millions more). The film was widely criticized for basically requiring knowledge of two different Disney+ shows and the first Captain Marvel (2019) film to even follow, a problem that has been afflicting the MCU more and more.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) was a brief flicker of hope for the MCU, grossing $845 million globally and widely received as “the best Marvel movie in years.” But director James Gunn, one of the most beloved and distinctive filmmakers in the Marvel roster, has definitively abandoned Disney to lead DC Studios, their Warner Bros. Discovery rivals, meaning that the MCU can’t even depend on him for the occasional win anymore.
At the same time as the MCU has been falling to pieces at the box office, its Disney+ luster has been fading just as quickly. Shows like She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and Secret Invasion frustrated longtime fans and tanked viewership numbers, while the eagerly awaited Daredevil: Born Again appears to be caught in a cycle of endless rewrites and delays.
There has been much made of “superhero fatigue,” the idea that audiences are simply burnt out on endless MCU sequels, particularly (as with Quantumania and The Marvels), that they seem to require an increasing amount of background knowledge to enjoy. Disney CEO Bob Iger has been actively pushing back against the idea that fans don’t want more MCU movies and instead says that they simply want good films.
Earlier this month, at the San Francisco Morgan Stanley conference, Iger revealed that Disney was actively killing Marvel projects with the idea of producing fewer, stronger films. He said, “It’s not audience fatigue. They want great films…Focus is really important. We reduced the output of Marvel, both number of films they make and the number of TV shows, and that really becomes critical.”
Bob Iger seems as good as his word, and upcoming major MCU releases have been stripped down to a comparatively lean slate: Deadpool & Wolverine (2024), Blade (2025), Thunderbolts (2025), and The Fantastic Four (2025). It turns out that the first of those films will not only be a soft reboot of the entire MCU but is forcing The Fantastic Four to be shaped around it.
‘Deadpool’ MCU Reboot and ‘The Fantastic Four’
As Inside the Magic recently reported, Marvel Studios acquired the rights to the mega-popular Ryan Reynolds Deadpool franchise as part of its purchase of 21st Century, only to immediately scrap plans for the upcoming third movie.
Deadpool‘s route into cinematic success has been a tortured one. Ryan Reynolds first appeared as the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), which is widely regarded as one of the worst movies in the Fox X-Men franchise, albeit in an almost unrecognizable iteration of the Merc with the Mouth (seriously, he didn’t even have a mouth).
Despite that, Ryan Reynolds didn’t give up hope for the character and returned in Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2 (2018), both of which immediately turned the character into a global superstar. Plans for Deadpool 3 were afoot at Fox, with writers Rhett Rheese and Paul Wernick telling Cinemablend that it would be a comparatively light movie compared to the now-canceled X-Force film, saying, “Deadpool 3 will be different from X-Force… [it’ll be] personal and small. So I think [it’s the] best of all worlds, really.”
Actro Karan Soni (who played taxi driver Dopinder in both Deadpool movies) revealed to Screenrant that the scrapped Deadpool 3 would have been a skewed kind of Christmas story. That oddly appears to be a recurring theme for both Deadpool in Marvel Comics and Ryan Reynolds in real life, who starred in the A Christmas Carol adaptation Spirited in 2022.
Reynolds himself has confirmed that he had co-written a Deadpool Christmas with Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, saying, “It got lost in the shuffle of Disney acquiring Fox, and it never got made. Maybe one day we’ll get to make that movie. It’s not a musical, but it’s a full Deadpool Christmas movie. So one day.”
Instead, the Deadpool 3 replacement, Deadpool & Wolverine, appears to be a soft reboot of the MCU. The trailer for the film reveals Wade Wilson being recruited by the Time Variance Authority (TVA) and that our “little cinematic universe is about to change forever.” We also see that Deadpool is from an entirely different universe than the MCU and will be brought into it, along with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, to adjust the timeline somehow.
Related: ‘Deadpool’ Star Finally Opens up About “Ultra Secret” Cameos in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’
While Marvel is doing its best to keep things under wraps, former X-Men director Simon Kinberg praised that film, saying, “That for [Jackman], and for Ryan [Reynolds] and for Shawn [Levy], exploring some aspects that perhaps we haven’t explored before, I would imagine is appealing.” That strongly suggests that we’ll likely be seeing versions of both characters that haven’t been seen before, likely because there will be multiple Variants of one or both in the film.
The Shawn Levy-directed film is widely expected to bring the X-Men to the MCU and lead into the upcoming Secret Wars film. Reportedly, it will introduce new Multiverse concepts that will become crucial to the future crossover film, including the idea of an “Anchor,” according to industry scooper @DanielRPK, which appears to be the idea that each universe has a crucial Variant whose death results in the destruction of that entire timeline.
Now, @DanielRPK (via Fantastic Four Updates) has also reported that The Fantastic Four will also not take place in the MCU, at least to begin with.
‘THE FANTASTIC FOUR’ will reportedly take place in an alternate universe.
Filming will begin in August in London.
(via: @DanielRPK) pic.twitter.com/z4p5UCGD1B
— Fantastic Four Updates (@F4Update) March 27, 2024
Kevin Feige first announced The Fantastic Four movie at the Marvel Studios San Diego Comic-Con presentation all the way back in 2019, before plans for the Christmas-themed Deadpool 3 had yet been canceled and replaced with Deadpool & Wolverine‘s Multiverse-resetting adventures. We can infer from this that the soft reboot of the latter film has basically called for the premise of multiple films to be rewritten, including The Kang Dynasty, Secret Wars, and The Fantastic Four.
It is particularly notable that both Deadpool & Wolverine and The Fantastic Four share a core conceit: that their characters do not belong to the MCU proper as we know it. Given that the former definitely involves Wade Wilson and Logan being brought over to the Sacred Timeline with huge effects on continuity, it stands to reason that The Fantastic Four may likely start out in one universe and be transported into the MCU as part of their debut film.
A few other clues support the idea that Deadpool’s Multiversal tampering will bring the Fantastic Four team into the MCU from another timeline. For one thing, Kevin Feige has already said that the movie will not involve an origin story but takes place in the 1960s, meaning that we will be encountering the First Family as an established group sometime in the past; while it would not make sense for the MCU as we know it, it would absolutely make sense in a different timeline in which the Fantastic Four are the major superheroes, rather than the Avengers.
For another, the retro-styled artwork (as seen above) that officially announced The Fantastic Four is so different from the typical iconography of the MCU that it hints that they could be coming from a place that is wildly different from the movies and shows we’ve seen previously. This could also be a smart move for Marvel Studios on another level; as the films have racked up into the dozens, the MCU has been accused of “looking the same” and having interchangeable visuals, so marking The Fantastic Four as literally visually distinct could also tie into the alternate timeline concept.
And, it needs to be said, in Marvel Comics, the Fantastic Four have always been known as scientists and explorers in the beyond, whether it’s the space mission that gave them their powers in the first place or forays into the Negative Zone and the Quantum Realm. It would be perfectly in character for the group to be the representatives of a different universe that somehow leap over into the MCU with Deadpool’s help.
Do you think Deadpool will be responsible for the Fantastic Four joining the MCU? Tell Inside the Magic your theories in the comments below!
Deadpool & Wolverine is currently scheduled to hit theaters on July 26. The film stars Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova (Charles Xavier’s evil twin sister), Matthew Macfadyen as TVA agent Paradox, Morena Baccarin as Vanessa, Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Karan Soni as Dopinder, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Aaron Stanford as the X-Men’s Pyro, and Jennifer Garner as Elektra from the Fox Daredevil franchise.
The Fantastic Four is scheduled for release on July 25, 2025. It will star Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing.