If you're excited by the prospect of Thor, Captain America, and finally The Avengers in 2012, then this'll be big news for you. The Avengers isn’t the end. Marvel's President of Consumer Products, Paul Glitter, has made a vague but very interesting statement. According to Bleeding Cool, Glitter told Advertising Age, a trade mag, that Marvel's next "big plan" will come to fruition in 2017. Unfortunately, he refused to give more details than that.

Sure this is barely news, but it still opens up a whole world of possibilities for comic book movie fans. BC was quick to hope for a Civil War film (or films), and I definitely agree. In Marvel lore, the Civil War is a crossover storyline in which almost all of Marvel’s heroes collide in one big, plot. The hope here is that the success of The Avengers will tie together all the Marvel films, and more importantly, make mainstream audiences comfortable with the idea of the universe as a whole. If that comes to pass, the Civil War event had some amazing moments, not the least of which being one of the most dramatic character deaths ever in comics.

Of course, doing this means that Marvel would probably need to grapple with copyright issues. Civil War involves characters they don’t currently control like X-Men over at Fox and Spider-Man which is currently controlled by Sony Pictures. But since we’re talking about a plan as far off as 2017, that might give Marvel the time they need to find a way to work with, or get the characters away from, Sony and Fox. If the new Origins films and the Spider-Man reboot fail to make waves at the box office, this might not be as impossible as it sounds.

Civil War just one possibility though. Marvel could have anything in mind here. Skrull? House of M? World War Hulk? Who knows! What’s great is that they have a plan and The Avengers is just the beginning.