It's all but official now: Disney is going to purchase the film, TV, and other assets of 21st Century Fox after its competitor for the latter company, Comcast (which also owns SYFY), dropped out of the bidding last week. Once all the legalities and paperwork are sorted, Disney will absorb Fox and all its entertainment properties in a process that will likely be completed by next year.

This means, as widely discussed, that the Marvel properties still under license to Fox — the X-Men, Deadpool, Fantastic Four and all their related characters — will return to Marvel Studios, a Disney subsidiary. This will potentially bring all the superheroes mentioned above and more into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which would fill in the last remaining significant blank space in the MCU.

With the merger expected to go into effect by late 2019, what will happen to the Fox Marvel properties already in production or development? Two of those movies — Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants — exist on film already, while others such as X-Force and Gambit are in various stages of development.

With all these movies tentatively slated for release in 2019, 2020, and beyond, their fate once the merger goes through remains uncertain. Do Dark Phoenix or The New Mutants get released before the two universes unite? Does Marvel retool them to fit into the larger MCU? What happens to some of the other Marvel projects Fox is said to be working on? We had a chance to indulge in some good old theorizing and speculation, and came up with some possible scenarios. Let's have a look...