Let’s face it, Fox has royally screwed up the X-Men franchise. The last movie has a few apologists and made money, but everyone knows it’s a piece of crap. If Fox makes another X-Men movie I fully expect it to devolve into full on Batman & Robin mode.

Still, there may be hope. Fox may not make the next X-Men movie.

We all know they went well out of their way to make it known that the third movie would be the last, and killed off half the cast just for the hell of it. Then Fox saw how much money the movie made, even though everyone hated it, and suddenly got interested in doing another one. Unfortunately they’re probably not interested in doing one right.

XMenFilms.com says that talks between mutant owner Marvel and 20th Century Fox aren’t going well. They're underway, but they say there’s a lot of disagreement over what to do next. There’s no deal on the table and Marvel and Fox seem to want to go different directions. Presumably Fox wants to carry on the way they have and Marvel has an alternate plan, one that involves making good movies again.

The good news here isn’t that the movie won’t get made, but that Marvel no longer needs Fox to make it. Their in-house production company is going full-steam ahead, and if Fox won’t do what they want with Professor X’s protégé’s there’s a good chance they’ll tell Fox to drop dead and go make exactly what they want on their own. At this point, that might be the best thing possible for the X-Men.

Thanks to Henry for the tip.