Simon Kinberg Explains Deadpool, Gambit, Fantastic Four’s Place In X-Men Universe

Fox’s corner of the superhero movie landscape is going to expand significantly this year, with the release of Deadpool, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Gambit. While we know that these films all take place in a shared universe, the exact details of their relationship has been a bit unclear.

Simon Kinberg offered some more details during a visit to the set of Apocalypse (via JoBlo):

“Well this movie take space chronologically before those other films, so it’s more like those films have to acknowledge this than we acknowledge Gambit, Deadpool, or Fantastic Four or anything else that exists within the sort of Fox/Marvel universe. But I work on all of those films in one capacity or another, either as a producer on all of them and as a writer on Fantastic Four and this movie, so I’m certainly aware of all the different stories we’re telling at the same time, and they all are part of a larger fabric now, and so the world of Deadpool, the world of Gambit, exists in a post-Days of Future Past, post-Apocalypse world where all of these stories are the same as our shared history. The same way that each of us of different ages knows about Nixon and knows about Reagan and knows about 9/11, our fictitious events like the stadium dropping on the White House in 1973 is part of the world in which Gambit, Deadpool, Wolverine on forward exists.”

It’s interesting to note that Kinberg includes Fantastic Four in this quote. He could just be referring to the “Fox/Marvel universe” in a corporate sense, rather than an in-universe sense, but he does say that the film is linked to X-Men Franchise.

However, he doesn’t mention the Fantastic Four‘s world when he begins talking about specific events in a shared history. This seems to support previous statements from Kinberg that place the X-Men and the Fantastic Four in “parallel universes,” making them part of the same multiversal landscape, but keeping the two franchises out of each other’s way until Fox is ready to bring them together, should that moment ever arrive.

Check out when Deadpool, Gambit, X-Men: Apocalypse and other movies are coming out in ComicBook.com’s Movie Release Schedule.