Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-5933274-20150905203757/@comment-61022-20151022140410

Yeah the rights issues with the Fantastic Four are kind of weird, it seems like when the rights were sold off they cherry picked what ancillary characters became part of that movie franchise. The above is true for those characters, yet other characters who made their starts in FF (Black Panther, Klaw, the Kree, Ronan) did not. It seems like those rights covered only the first 50 issues of Fantastic Four -- with the exception of Namor, whose right are apparently locked up with Universal Pictures presently (I think). Very odd. It's certainly not as all encompassing as the X-Men franchising rights (which basically boils down to: All mutants and characters that first appeared in an X-Men book)

I think we can expect that with the all-new all-different Marvel that the House of Ideas is going to shift even harder away from those franchises that the licenses are owned by others and presently don't have a mutual production deal (ala Spider-Man). The Fantastic Four seems to be the hardest hit with the "end" of their series. The characters are all very much active and I can see them putting them in other books, because even though FF was the first Marvel hero book, it's never exactly been a huge sell and the movies have all tanked.

While on the other hand they can't exactly turf the X-Men because of their popularity already you can see a shift where they are focusing more on the Inhumans, which is probably going to be a bait-and-switch until they either get the rights back or can bury the X-Men. The movies are also quite popular, so Marvel is in a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't situation. They'll keep making new X-books and hyping existing characters because it'll get people to buy the comics, but they have definitely shifted away from any merchandising of any movie properties that are not theirs.

I thought it was pretty funny when one of the few (or was it the only?) promotion for the last FF movie was a Denny's promotion. A mostly American franchise that doesn't usually dabble in promotion. It was almost depressingly bad that Fox had to go that far to find someone to promote that horrid movie.