Why Marvel Studios Is Branching Out Beyond Superheroes

And there’s another potential parallelism going on here …

This Is All Great News For The X-Men (In The Long Run)

Something else 2020s Marvel Studios has in common with 1970s Marvel Comics: both are putting the X-Men on the bench. After Disney absorbed 20th Century Fox, all future X-Men projects were put “on hold” and eventually canceled. Well, all except the third Deadpool movie, but that one could easily ignore the X-Men altogether and end up being 90 minutes of Deadpool trolling Nick Fury (which would be great because he could finally finish saying “motherf …”).

The fact that Deadpool was allowed to live on suggests that Disney might have been more forgiving with the rest of the X-Men franchise if they were, you know, still making money. Both Dark Phoenix and New Mutants flopped pretty badly — which is similar to the state of the X-Men comic in the early ’70s when sales were so poor that Marvel stopped making new stories about ol’ Chuck Xavier and the gang for five years. Of course, the X-Men had a huge comeback and eventually became so popular that they almost single-handedly kept Marvel afloat for a while. They are also likely the reason Marvel left the whole “diversity of genres” thing behind to focus on raking in those sweet mutant superhero bucks. Here are 25 covers published by Marvel in the same month in 2004, along with precisely zero Bible comics:

Perhaps more so than any other Marvel franchise, the X-Men can support multiple franchises of its own — certainly, way more than, say, Iron Fist or Ant-Man (although a Luis spin-off starring Michael Pena would be pretty dope). And maybe that’s why Marvel Studios is keeping them in their back pocket. The moment everyone starts getting fed up with the current crop of MCU heroes, they can spring the all-new, all-different X-Men on us and start milking them as Marvel Comics did in the ’80.

In other words, yes, we expect the MCU to be at least 20% Wolverine series by 2040. You have our permission to leave a mean comment if it’s anything less than that. That should give them at least another decade until they can bring back Robert Downey Jr. as a hologram and start everything all over again.

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok‘s heroic effort to read and comment every ’90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com.

Top Image: Marvel Comics

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