Board Thread:Television/@comment-1713281-20151029033607/@comment-1895174-20170927042115

KalKent wrote: AGotcha. With that and the Inhumans, I guess it's easier to get away with pastiches of what Fox owns the rights to, by doing it on TV rather than in movies, so they will have to make use of whatever Marvel Studios don't plan to use (which makes me curious how the thing with Tilda Johnson will play out for both 'Black Panther' and season 2 of 'Luke Cage'). Although I highly doubt they will at some point in the future introduce their own pastiches of the Fantastic Four. I think Marvel's more optimistic about getting the rights to them back at some point.

That being said, the "pastiches" on Agents of SHIELD are less about rights issues than it is about not having a lot of material to draw from. Even if Marvel had the rights to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four characters, it's not like the AoS showrunners would be allowed to use a lot of those characters. There's too much potential for them to show up in a movie. If they want to use any characters from the comics, they're pretty much stuck using the D-listers.

So since they can't play with the expensive toys, they took the ones they could find on the clearance shelf and pretended they were something else. That's a clever workaround for a problem a lot of TV series based on comic books find themselves in (see: Arrow losing Amanda Waller and the Suicide Squad).