Avengers Writers: Fantastic Four and X-Men Will Make Next Phases of the MCU Unlike Anything Seen Before

Avengers: Endgame scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely are putting a pause on superheroes after penning six Marvel Studios movies in eight years, but the writing duo anticipate an all-new Marvel Cinematic Universe when chief Kevin Feige integrates properties gained in Disney's $71.3 billion acquisition of 20th Century Fox.

"It'll be fascinating to see what Kevin Feige does with the properties he's now getting from the Fox merger with X-Men and Fantastic Four," Markus told the Los Angeles Times.

"And to see what the MCU version of those things is, because I very much doubt it will be something that resembles what you've seen before. So that will be very exciting."

Beyond the continuing movie-side of the MCU — Spider-Man: Far From Home will close out Phase Three in July ahead of the future Black Widow, The Eternals, Shang-Chi, and sequels for Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), among others — Feige is readying multiple live-action MCU-set series for the coming Disney+ streaming service, where Marvel Studios will tell interconnected stories extending narratives established in the films.

"And streaming is really interesting [in terms of] longer-form storytelling," Markus said. "The MCU is one big long-form story, but to be able to spend six or eight hours with Falcon and the Winter Soldier getting deeper into that story, I think that is really intriguing."

The approach is comparable to the defunct Marvel One-Shots once produced by the studio — short films starring such fan-favorites as Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) premiered on the Blu-ray and DVD releases of such films as The Avengers and Iron Man 3.

"They used to make Marvel shorts — two, three, five minutes of a little side story that you could follow — and now you can follow for 10 episodes instead of five minutes, and boy, you can go anywhere," Markus said.

That future includes The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, teaming Captain America (Chris Evans) successor Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), WandaVision, centered around Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany), and an untitled Loki series led by Tom Hiddleston.

It remains to be seen if Marvel Studios introduces any Fantastic Four or X-Men characters on Disney+ before introducing rebooted takes on those franchises to the big screen MCU, where the team of freedom-fighting mutants aren't anticipated to appear for a "very long time."

"It'll be a while. It's all just beginning and the five-year plan that we've been working on, we were working on before any of that was set," Feige recently told io9 of the X-Men.

"So really it's much more, for us, less about specifics of when and where [the X-Men will appear] right now and more just the comfort factor and how nice it is that they're home. That they're all back. But it will be a very long time."

Feige is similarly tight-lipped on plans for Marvel's first family, but said in January the idea of finally including these two blockbuster franchises and their hundreds of characters is "very exciting."

"The truth is, I'm excited for all of them. I'm excited, and it's not just the marquee names you know — there are hundreds of names on those documents, on those agreements," Feige told MTV News.

Gaining access to almost all of Marvel Comics' library of characters is "something I've been dreaming about for my almost 20 years at Marvel," Feige added. "And it's very exciting."