Keeping up with the Marvel and DC universes is hard enough at the best of times (three Joker movies in the DCEU, anyone?) without having to factor in all the characters that are currently split between two studios.

So for those of you who are ready to see Deadpool crushing on Thor in live-action or the Thing fighting alongside the Hulk, Marvel supremo Stan Lee has some good news for you – he's confident Marvel is working on getting back the rights for all of its characters.

"Sooner or later, they're going to get the rights back to all our characters," Lee said during a recent appearance at Wizard World Nashville (via ComicBookMovie.com).

"They're working on it, and they're still making X-Men movies and stuff. Don't worry about it. You'll get more Marvel superheroes than you'll have time to look at in the next few years."

20th Century Fox

Related: X-Men movies ranked worst to best, from X-Men to Logan

As it stands, 20th Century Fox currently holds the film rights to X-Men and Fantastic Four, and recently set dates for six more Marvel films up to 2021, including New Mutants, Deadpool 2 and X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

But while its X-Men franchise is coming along nicely, the studio's latest attempt to launch a Fantastic Four film series didn't go down too well at all, leaving many Marvel fans calling for the rights to revert back to Marvel Studios so they can do a better job.

Of course, it's also worth noting that Stan Lee doesn't actually have anything to do with the day-to-day running of Marvel Entertainment – and it wasn't all that long ago that current boss Kevin Feige was shooting down the possibility of the Fantastic Four joining the MCU anytime soon – so his comments shouldn't be taken too definitively.

20th Century Fox

Either way, we probably shouldn't expect Fox to follow in Sony's footsteps and team up with Marvel anytime soon. But as long as Stan Lee has hope that all the rights will one day be back with Marvel, we have hope too.

And in the meantime, we can enjoy watching pretty much every character that Marvel does hold the film rights to battling it out in the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War, which will be released on April 27, 2018 in the UK and May 4, 2018 in the US.

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