Thread:ADour/@comment-5779345-20121213042034/@comment-1895174-20121213050811

I can answer that.

Wolverine, and the rest of the X-Men, were licensed off to FOX, specifically the 20th Century Fox film corporation, in the late 90s in an attempt to make a film based on the X-Men properties. Keep in mind that this was a time when comic book and superhero movies were the laughingstock of the film industry.

Flash-forward a little less than a decade later, and superhero films are box office gold. Marvel comics licensed off many of their most notable characters, including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and many others. Then, Marvel gets an idea - why not use the money they've made off licensing away their characters to film studios, and make the films themselves? Cut out the middle man.

So, starting with 2008's Iron Man, Marvel gets the idea to build a shared world their heroes can inhabit. Of course, this idea eventually culminates in The Avengers. But the catch is they can only use characters they have not given away the license to. By now, a lot of the characters that were licensed earlier last decade have come back to Marvel - the Hulk (obviously) returned to Marvel not all that long after Ang Lee's film was made, Blade and the Punisher were returned before December 2010, and Marvel reacquired Daredevil only last October.

But these were all franchises that were abandoned by the studios who had the license to them. The same cannot be said for what Marvel still does not have. Sony and Fox strongly believe in their Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and X-Men films, and each of those properties has at least one film coming by 2015. As long as Fox keeps making X-Men films, Wolverine will never appear in any movie related to The Avengers.