Considering the staggering success of Marvel's foray into the world of TV under the Disney banner, it is hard to comprehend that the entire principle of serialising the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a weekly audience was initially seen as a gamble on the studio's part. With the likes of Secret Invasion and Armor Wars heading to Disney+ in future, along with the likes of She-Hulk, Bob Chapek recently spoke at the Credit Suisse 23rd Annual Communications Conference about the long awaited arrival of the Fantastic Four into the MCU, as well as hinting that we are likely to see them in more than one movie, or even more than one medium.

The Fantastic Four have been and gone a few times in the movie world, never seeming to hit the mark for one reason or another. Chris Evan's first brush with Marvel in the 2005 version, which also starred Ioan Griffith, Jessica Alba and Michael Chiklis , was a hit, but the follow up, Rise of The Silver Surfer didn't fare as well. Similarly the reboot of the franchise in 2015, was seen as an absolute dud, having spent much of its runtime setting up what amounted to one very short fight between the four superheroes and their nemesis Dr Doom, but turned out to be an easily defeated villain.

However, the merger of Fox and Disney allowed Marvel to reclaim their right on the Fantastic Four, and speculation began immediately as to when them and the X-Men would be arriving in their rightful home in the MCU. Following pandemic delays, new trailers for the MCU's Phase Four slate began to drop, and right at the end the list was a new entry to those seen before. The Fantastic Four have a place in the future of Marvel's magnum opus, and that meant it was only a question of how long we have to wait to see more about it.

While Bob Chapek wasn't forthcoming with that kind of information, he did have one interesting thing to say. After telling the conference that there is still a lot of Marvel content to come. He said, "As you increase output, and go deeper and deeper into mining the Marvel mythology, it doesn't have to tap itself out. We've got great stories to tell, and we're telling great stories." He went on to point out that there is a lot of "mining" to do with Marvel's First Family, and also noted that he spoke of the Fantastic Four as a franchise rather than a film, which would suggest that in future we could not only see more movies, but also TV spin-offs as we have with the current run of WandaVision, The Falcon & The Winter Soldier and Disney+'s current top performer, Loki.

While there is no way of knowing how any of this will play out, it is worth considering that if they intend to avoid the errors of the last Fantastic Four reboot, then they could introduce the characters in their already transformed superhero state. If you remember, Infinity War and Endgame both were made in a way that you had to know what happened previously before you went into the cinema, otherwise there was no way for you to know what was going on. With the Fantastic Four being pretty well known to anyone with any interest in superhero movies, would it be such a stretch to lose some of the backstory, and could this then be told in a prequel style series at a later date. We wait with baited breath for more news on this as and when Feige and Co decided they are ready to share. This news arrives from The Direct.