It’s funny how the game can change once you’ve made a billion and a half dollars…
As I mentioned earlier this year when it came out that Sony very nearly hopped into the Marvel Studios movie universe by lending their Amazing Spider-Man Oscorp building to the skyline of The Avengers, it was little more than naive fanboy wanking to consider movie crossovers of properties like Daredevil, X-Men, Fantastic Four and The Avengers. Studio politics and movie rights were too murky for such a thing to ever happen!
Now –as every studio that’s not Marvel has lost most of their superhero steam– there are small signs that players in control of Marvel characters outside of Marvel’s control would be happy to board the billion dollar train and get some heat off of it.
The latest hint is little more than a producer confirming that she would indeed love to see the X-Men and The Avengers side by side, but it’s a much more unguardedly enthusiastic comment than you’d usually see from a producer. It comes form Laura Schuler Donner in an interview with her and her husband at Crave.
Now that The Avengers has done so well, it seems like the other studios with Marvel properties can see the advantage of making a deal. Can you see a world where this generation of X-Men could be in an Avengers movie?
Lauren Shuler Donner: I would love it. I would love it. I personally have close ties to Marvel because of Kevin Feige, because Kevin worked for me. But to take our characters and mingle them in the way that they were written, yeah, absolutely.
That’s as much as anyone’s going to get out of her now, and that’s a long way from Matthew Vaughn or Joss Whedon actively hinting that such a crossover is imminent. The Donner’s are producers on both X-Men: Days Of Futures Past and The Wolverine though, so they’re not trifling minds in the think tank.
Again, all very small, un-substantive signs, but it’s a shift in attitude that tells me we will see some studio crossover, even if it doesn’t happen till “Phase Three” perhaps.
via Total Film