'Avengers 5': Kevin Feige Gives First Timeline for an X-Men, MCU Crossover

Captain America and Wolverine have interacted for decades in Marvel comics but for almost 20 years they’ve been barred from appearing in movies together due to a licensing deal between Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox. Now, with Disney set to acquire a huge chunk of Fox, that barrier is going away, and now we may finally know when the MCU’s Avengers will finally meet the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige recently appeared as a guest on Variety podcast Playback, where he reflected on ten years of Marvel movies and offered a taste of what’s to come. When asked about the studio’s plans to merge Fox properties like the X-Men into the MCU, Feige offered what may be our first legitimate timeline at when that crossover could finally happen.

Here’s what Feige said when asked if Marvel had permission to start developing new stories with those character:

“No, not yet, but we’ve been told it’s looking very, very good and could happen in the first six months of next year … The notion of the characters that had previously been under a Fox agreement coming back is great. It’s nice when a company that created all these characters can have access to all those characters. It’s unusual not to; Marvel’s been in a unique position to not have access to those characters for a long time … But in terms of actually thinking about it and actually planning things, we haven’t started that yet.”

That’s pretty huge. It means Marvel could start working on new stories for characters like Wolverine and Thing by summer 2019. Unfortunately, that probably means they won’t have time to squeeze any of those characters into Avengers: Endgame, but it’s possible we could see them start to pop up in whatever comes after that (Doctor Strange 2, Black Panther 2, Eternals, etc).

As for a standalone X-Men or Fantastic Four film in the MCU, we’re probably at least a few years away from that happening. Marvel started working on a script for Black Panther in 2011 and that movie didn’t hit theaters until 2018. Hopefully it doesn’t take that long, but the point remains, it’s bound to take at least a few years before any of these new properties get their own films.

Avengers: Endgame hits theaters on April 26, 2019, but Wolverine probably won’t be in that one.

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