James Murdoch, the current co-COO of 20th Century Fox, made a statement at the most recent J P Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference about Fox’s plans for future franchise movies and stated that he wanted the studio to look for things other than comic book movies.
“We don’t want to be a place where people say ‘if it’s not a comic book movie, or something else, then I wouldn’t even take it to them'”, he said, adding they wanted fresh voices to “create whole new franchises”.
However, slightly contradictory to that statement, Murdoch also said that he wants more from its current comic book output.
“We think that’s a really rich part of that universe to sort of mine,” he said of X-Men and Fantastic Four. “[But] we don’t want to be a film business that’s only making one type of picture, we want to be a film business that has a real diversity of output,”
Currently, 20th Century Fox have Fantastic Four, X-Men: Apocalypse, Deadpool, Gambit, a sequel to The Wolverine, The New Mutants and an already announced sequel to Fantastic Four on the slate. Does that mean we can expect more, or less based on Murdoch’s comments?
Originally published May 19, 2015. Updated April 12, 2018.
