The Fox/ Marvel buyout is finished. Marvel finally regains the rights to a number of big properties they sold in the early 1990s. They each face inevitable reboots in the near future. There was a time when there almost was a Fox/Marvel crossover movie.
The early 2010s saw Marvel gaining traction in the early days of the MCU. Avengers was in the horizon, and executives at Fox had a novel idea. Fox wanted to make their own Avengers-style film with all of the Marvel properties they owned.
In a recent appearance in Fatman Beyond, screenwriter Zack Stentz (Thor, X-Men: First Class) was asked what films he’s written that never saw the light of day, he said:
“My ex-partner and I, when we were working at Fox and working on X-Men: First Class, we did a secret movie for them. I can’t tell you what the plot was. But I can tell you that it used all of the characters, all of the Marvel characters that Fox had at the time in 2011.
It used the X-Men, the Fantastic Four,
Daredevi , Deadpool. Daredevil was still at Fox at the time. And it was a really cool freakin’ script. We almost had Paul Greengrass directing it, which would’ve been so cool, but he had another project to do instead.It didn’t end up going. But it was a script I was really proud of and it would’ve been really good.”
Fox honored Trank’s request, moving on to make the atrocious 2015 Fantastic Four movie. The studio tettered around the gutter for a while before finding their footing with Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool.
Stentz and co-writer Ashley Miller wrote a draft that Josh Trank refused to make. So, what did this top secret script entail? According to Stentz:
“Josh Trank, who ended up doing the Fantastic Four that we saw in the theaters, we were supposed to be writing the script for him but nobody told him that we were doing it.
So, when he officially signed on he was like, ‘Why are you imposing these other writers on me? I want to use my own writer. I wanna do my own script.’ And he did his version instead.
It was one of those hammer blows to our career at the time, even though we had gotten paid.
I was so freakin’ proud of that script. How the Fantastic Four were almost the Fantastic Five except a young man named Victor von Doom was just too damaged and f—ed up to be part of them. I was very proud of the script. Josh Trank didn’t wanna do it.”
Stentz went on to work on CW’s The Flash, early drafts of Top Gun: Maverick, and the McG-directed Netflix film Rim of the World.
Stentz makes the script sound intriguing, although a film like this before Avengers would be more like older superhero films, rather than the newer ones.
