Fantastic Four Might Not Return To Marvel In The Disney/Fox Deal

There has been a lot of assumptions that the movie rights of the Fantastic Four would return to Marvel should the deal between Fox and Disney go ahead, but this might not actually be the case.

This is because while Fox owns the distribution rights to the Fantastic Four, it only owns part  of the movie rights, as the part belongs to Constantin Film, which is a German production company, who brought the rights to the Fantastic Four in 1986 and extended their deal in 1992.   This company was behind the infamous Fantastic Four movie that never was released but has since “leaked” out onto the internet.

In 1999, Constantin Filmmade an agreement with Fox to share the movie rights, which has seen three movies released, however none of those movies really worked and bombed with audiences.

There could be many different aspects to the deal, as while Fox’s part of the deal could pass over to Disney, they would have many options.  One well known rule of the Constantin deal was a movie had to be released every 7 years, so Disney could just wait until the old contract expires to gain full control.  And with dozens of Marvel movies in development and with 2 years already passed since the last movie, we could still have to wait five years before we see the Thing or Mr Fantastic on the screen.

Or they work out a deal similar to Sony with Spider-Man, or just pay out to buy the other part of the movie rights.  Either way, it’s not always as easy to work out Marvel’s movie rights.