Remember how Bryan Singer started teasing the potential of a “Fox Cinematic Universe,” where the new Fantastic Four and the cavalcade of X-Men movies crossed over? Well, apparently someone at Fox desperately shook him and told him to shut up, because now the movies aren’t even in the same universe as each other.


Given that Fox were ramping up production on multiple Marvel superhero films, it seemed almost inevitably that, at some point, they’d try to copy Marvel Studios even further and start giving us interconnected webs of characters and crossovers galore. But it turns out that the chances of that ever happening just got well and truly clobbered—and this time it wasn’t The Thing doing the clobberin’.

Speaking to the New York Daily News, producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker clarified that actually, the movies weren’t connected at all—and they actually take place in parallel universes to each other:

They exist in parallel universes. The Fantastic 4 live in a world without mutants. And the X-Men live in a world without the Fantastic 4. Crossing them over would be challenging, but we sure would love to see all those actors together, the way we had them on stage at [San Diego] Comic Con.


Cue everyone collectively going “huh” in response.

It seems like a very bizarre thing to say, in this age where everyone already on the Superhero bandwagon is combining said bandwagon with the shared universe bandwagon, making some sort of Voltron-esque bandwagon monstrosity. Not only from a marketing standpoint to make Fantastic Four even more isolated than it already was, but simply from the good idea standpoint too—it would’ve been cool to see these heroes team up and interact on the big screen,

Maybe it will still happen—after all, interdimensional shenanigans form a big part of the new Fantastic Four’s origin story. You know what though? After everything we’ve seen and heard about Fantastic Four, maybe it’s for the best that they’re literally worlds apart from the X-Men films.

[Via Comicbook.com]