Rumor: Marvel Studios reclaims ‘Fantastic Four’ movie rights [Updated]

[Update: Or not. Fuck.]

So, Fox announced a couple of X-Men spin-off television show properties yesterday. Okay. Whatever. Read about them here. But what is really interesting is this rumor: in exchange for signing off on these spin-offs, Marvel has been given the Fantastic Four movie rights.

Play List:

Yesterday saw a wave of Marvel news come forth, but the two biggest pieces of the intel were that the comic studio was partnering up with Fox and FX for “Hellfire” and “Legion,” respectively. The news of the TV shows was particularly intriguing given recent chatter of a potential X-men series, and now a new rumor posits what may be at the center of all this activity at Fox Television and its various divisions.

Den Of Geek is reporting that as part of the negotiations between Marvel and Fox for the new TV show, the comic studio gave Fox the TV rights for those aforementioned shows, in exchange for Fantastic Four (and possibly an “X-Men” TV series). That’s not all. Apparently, the plan is for a rebooted “Fantastic Four” movie to fill one of Marvel’s vacant release date slots in 2020. Evidently the deal also includes the rights to villains Galactus and Doctor Doom, as well as the Silver Surfer, which if true, probably means rights to the entire Fantastic Four universe.

There was a time when the likelihood of a studio giving up a major, branded comic book character would’ve seemed outrageous, but the landscape has changed in that regard. We’ve already seen Sony partner with Marvel after floundering with “The Amazing Spider-Man” to reboot the character, and so a similar scenario brokered between Fox and Marvel is not entirely out of the question. Certainly, the studio has remained mum on what they planned to do with the property after it tanked hard, and Mark Millar recently noted about a sequel, “…everything’s open to discussion. No decision has been made on anything yet like that.”