Following on the success that Marvel and Sony are currently having with Spider-Man: Homecoming many fans have been hoping for quite some time that Marvel might forge a similar deal with Fox to bring the Fantastic Four into the MCU. There have been rumors here and there over the last few years that such a deal might be possible, but now Kevin Feige has spoken out about all those rumors. While he doesn't discount that something could happen at some point, he makes it clear that there are no conversations currently happening. According to Feige...
I've been at Marvel for 17 years... There are certainly no plans whatsoever for that. But too many amazing things have happened over the past 17 years for me ever say never. But for now, nothing.
To be fair, the reason that this rumor started up again got debunked on its own over the course of this past weekend. Yahoo Movies reports that during the D23 Expo a life size Thanos was on display surrounded by four figures who were covered up so fans could not see who they were. Apparently, the rumor started that they could be the Fantastic Four, but when they were unveiled later in the weekend, it turned out they were actually the Children of Thanos, also known as the Black Order.
This is hardly the first time the rumor of the Fantastic Four coming back to Marvel has popped up though. The first family of Marvel currently resides over at Fox as far as the film rights go and following the last big screen efforts' lackluster performance, some believed, or at least hoped, that Fox might make the decision to cut their losses and either return the rights to Marvel altogether, or at least try to make some kind of deal. It's even possible that discussions along these lines have even happened, but if so, no deal has been made.
Still, Kevin Feige is happy to leave open the possibility, however remote, that something could happen down the road. Never is a word that simply doesn't exist in Feige's vocabulary, probably because there are a lot of things he might have thought would never happen that he has since seen happen in Hollywood. The deal that Marvel and Sony made over Spider-Man may have very well been one of those things. While Sony produced Spider-Man: Homecoming the story that it tells exists within the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Tom Holland's Peter Parker is set to continue playing the role in several more films produced by both Marvel and Sony.
Eventually, Fox will have to do something with the Fantastic Four or the film rights will revert back to Marvel anyway. This could mean yet another reboot of the franchise, though the studio will likely wait as long as they can if that's the plan so that fans will have mostly forgotten the last one by then.
