:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/61478403/dark_phoenix_DF_04714_R2_rgb.0.jpg)
In July, Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox shareholders overwhelmingly voted to merge the two companies, leaving the fates of certain intellectual property in question. Now, Disney CEO Bob Iger has told The Hollywood Reporter that the company’s plan to absorb the 20th Century Fox film division’s X-Men franchise is to have put it under the control of longtime Marvel Cinematic Universe producer Kevin Feige.
When asked if Feige would oversee “everything” as Disney absorbed the X-Men, a franchise spanning from 2000’s X-Men to the unreleased Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants, Iger answered:
I think it only makes sense. I want to be careful here because of what’s been communicated to the Fox folks, but I think they know. It only makes sense for Marvel to be supervised by one entity. There shouldn’t be two Marvels.
Iger seemed to be speaking about corporate and creative structure at Disney. In fact, he was careful not to say anything definite about the narrative future of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and Fox’s X-Men movies.
“Kevin’s got a lot of ideas,” Iger told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m not suggesting [that Deadpool becoming an Avenger is] one of them. But who knows?”
Whether the X-Men will ever meet the Avengers in the movies seems, for now, to still up in the air. If there are plans for the merger, it’s being played very close to the Disney vest.
