Today in Things That Could Have Been, we have some fresh insight on 20th Century Fox's initial plans for a crossover event film that would have seen a multitude of properties interacting on screen at a time when the Marvel Studios empire was still in the building stages.

This slab of intel comes from X-Men: First Class screenwriter Zack Stentz, who recently enjoyed a recorded conversation on Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin's Fatman Beyond podcast.

Speaking with the co-hosts on a scrapped idea that was circulating pre-Disney shift, Stentz said presumably about as much as he could regarding what potentially could have been a major blow against competitors at the time.

"My ex-partner and I, when we were working at Fox and we were working on X-Men: First Class, we did a secret movie for them that, I can't tell you what the plot was, but I can tell you that it used . . . all of the Marvel characters that Fox had at the time in 2011," Stentz said, as spotted by Heroic Hollywood over the weekend.

Daredevil, still a Fox property at the time, was a part of the planned crossover that "almost had" Jason Bourne's Paul Greengrass as its director. "It didn't end up going but it was a script I was really proud of and it would've been really good," Stentz said. The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and Deadpool were also slated for the mysterious crossover that almost made its way into existence.

For those entering the new Disney merger era with some skepticism, we can at least take comfort in the fact that the Deadpool franchise has already been confirmed to be staying in R-rated territory moving forward.