Simon Kinberg Hints At FOX’s Future Plans For Marvel License

Well, Simon Kinberg was a regular Chatty Cathy at WonderCon, wasn’t he?

His latest interview has just hit over at Collider and it deals with 20th Century Fox’s future plans for their Marvel licenses. And, once again, what he says might just raise the ire of a certain fan base.

First, Kinberg, who has been associated with Fox’s Marvel franchise in some form or another since 2003, explains that a regime change has enlightened the studio in regards to expanding it’s personal Marvel film universe.

Yeah, they definitely understand what they have now in a way that—having worked on the X-Men Fox movies since 2003, [it was a] different regime, really different culture inside the studio [back then], but outside the studio like you say, the juggernauts, the big movies of every summer are [now] superhero movies.  We’re gonna have three big superhero movies in the span of like a month and a half between Cap 2, Spider-Man, and us.  So Fox does understand that they are sitting on this massive universe with the X-Men, also with Fantastic Four obviously.  But they definitely have a sense of it and there’s a real interest and appetite for how to explore and expand that world into other movies, into spinoffs, into different time periods, the whole gamut.

This tells us nothing new. The only surprising thing is that it took them so long to realize that, and how the past regime could be so short sided.

With all these properties included under their agreement, could expansion into TV be in the future? Maybe.

We’re still in this place of figuring out what the future of the franchise will be, but when you look at S.H.I.E.L.D. to some extent and what Marvel is doing now with Daredevil and other shows on Netflix, it makes sense to tell some of these stories in TV partly because there’s just not enough screens to do all these characters, and also because the serialized format of comic books is better suited for TV.  Because that’s it, every week you come back to the same characters different story, and in comic books every week it’s the same characters, different story.

I think what [Fox is] seeing now is with the proliferation of new kinds of visual and special effects, there’s a way to make these stories that doesn’t cost $300 million every time you have to make a huge movie

It helps that Fox, like Disney (ABC) and Warner Brothers (CW), has a television network under its corporate umbrella that would at the very least provide a first look at any Marvel TV project. Personally, I think a Madrox/X-Factor TV show could possibly be done for that budget and would work very well in the medium.

And Deadpool fans who have been waiting a long time for an adult version of their favorite character to hit the big screen, might have gotten good and bed news from Kinberg, as the writer speaks about bring the character to the big screen:

Yeah, it makes sense to me.  Genuinely it’s early phases, early days, but if you’re gonna do a Deadpool movie, I think you’ve gotta do a hard-R, darker movie and he is the perfect character to do it with.

Again with the “darker”! I think Simon needs to hit the (comic) books again, or walk away from the “darker is better” school of comic book movies. Deadpool works best with an R-Rating based simply on the amount of people he kills (although, I believe you can get a just as good PG-13 film with the character as well), but the character is anything but dark. Not that I’m the biggest expert on Deadpool, but he’s essentially Bugs Bunny with a gun. If you’re looking at the right tone for a Deadpool film, imagine a version of Shoot ‘Em Up with a young Robin Williams in the Clive Owen role. If you plan on bringing a pensive, angst ridden Deadpool to the big screen, you be better served leaving that version on the shelf.