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While some comic book fans are giddy at the prospect of Disney-owned Marvel Studios getting its hands on some of the Marvel Comics properties that are housed at 20th Century Fox, the Disney/Fox deal is still far from complete. This has left many to wonder how, exactly, Fox is proceeding with its various films in development. Before it was announced that Disney was going to acquire 20th Century Fox, the latter studio had carved out an ambitious and successful plan for its superhero films—namely fitting each into a subgenre, like making Logan a Western or Deadpool a raunchy R-rated comedy.

Fox still has a number of Marvel Comics adaptations in the hopper, so when Collider’s own Steve Weintraub recently spoke with Dark Phoenix writer/director Simon Kinberg and producer Hutch Parker for an exclusive interview, he asked how the impending Disney/Fox deal was impacting their development process. As Kinberg explained, it’s still business as usual:

“The status [of the deal] I won’t speak to because that’s above my pay grade, but we’re just continuing to make movies that we make and developing movies that we’ve been developing for years now, like Gambit, or finishing movies like New Mutants and Dark Phoenix and Deadpool, that comes out this Christmas, and others, Multiple Man, other movies we’ve been working on we continue to work on.”

Steve pointed out that what some fans don’t seem to understand is that until the deal is done, Fox has to operated under the assumption it won’t go through, lest they be left without enough films to release. Parker agreed and elaborated on this point:

“Until the deal is completely finished—which has in principal terms been agreed to by the two boards but it hasn’t yet gone through the final approvals that go through the government. But until that’s done, Fox has to remain Fox and perform as it would as if it wasn’t up for sale. So for all intents and purposes you proceed as business as usual.”

Look for more from the interview on Collider soon.

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