The Biggest Upcoming Crossover Movie Rumors That No One Is Talking About
A "crossover" movie is that rare and dramatic cinematic occurrence in which familiar characters from different film franchises meet and team up to fight a common enemy, or each other. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has often utilized the formula, bringing together different heroes from across its vast cosmic landscape, but crossovers are not a new thing. Going back beyond even Batman v Superman, Alien vs. Predator, or Freddy vs. Jason, Universal Studios released Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943, and five years later, the lumbering abomination of science met comedy duo Abbott and Costello. Is it mere fan service to inorganically force these dream teams into existence, just to see what would happen? Absolutely, but that doesn't mean crossovers aren't irresistible fun (or lucrative at the box office).
With studio consolidation and cinematic universes being the name of the game in Hollywood today, filmmakers are more eager than ever to bring fan favorites together. Here are a few crossovers that are rumored to be in the works. You might be surprised by some of the cinematic clashes potentially coming to a theater near you in a couple of years.
G.I. Joe, Visionaries, and M.A.S.K.
Hollywood is always eager to create a franchise based on well-known properties. After all, it's a lot easier to get audiences on board for a movie with which they're already somewhat familiar, and may even fondly remember. Likely intrigued by the blockbuster success of live-action movies inspired by '80s cartoons like Transformers, Paramount Pictures announced in 2015 its intention to create a sprawling, multi-film world featuring a number of '80s cartoons, including G.I. Joe, Micronauts, Visionaries, and M.A.S.K. All those cartoons were built around toy lines, and they're all controlled by toy conglomerate Hasbro now, so one could call this the Hasbro Cinematic Universe.
Hasbro's moviemaking wing, Allspark Pictures, will make the movies and Paramount will oversee development, which will include creating a writers' room led by Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman to develop a multi-movie plan, not unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With nearly five years gone by without a movie in theaters featuring the holographic Visionaries or transforming vehicles of M.A.S.K., however, it could mean that this crossover attempt has faced difficulties getting off the ground.
Transformers and Power Rangers
When Paramount announced its plans for a series of movies based on several lines of Hasbro-owned '80s toys, it didn't yet control the rights to one of the most popular merchandising juggernauts of the '90s: the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. From 1993 on, the Power Rangers franchise rebooted most every year in a different iteration, but generally always starred a group of teens who each controlled a giant robot, which in turn would combine to create an even larger robot, which they'd use to fight off evil aliens. As of 2018, the Power Rangers are in the Hasbro family, and the toy maker plans to exercise its rights, developing a sequel to the gritty, dark 2017 reboot film, as well as floating the idea of combining the property with another one of the feathers in its moviemaking cap: the Transformers.
According to a 2019 report by Geekosity (via Bounding Into Comics), Hasbro wants the Rangers and the robots in disguise to cohabit "the same universe." However, this would not be the pre-existing, extremely popular Transformers franchise from director Michael Bay, but rather the "post-Bumblebee vision" set forth by the 2018 Transformers spinoff.
The Avengers and the X-Men
As far as the pages of comic books are concerned, the Avengers (and all of that team's rotating cast of associated heroes) and the X-Men are in the same world — they're all Marvel characters. In the movie world, it's a bit more complicated. Marvel sold the X-Men film rights to the studio formerly known 20th Century Fox in the late '90s, resulting in a successful franchise of a dozen movies over two decades, featuring Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, and Halle Berry as Storm, among others. But that deal predates the development of Marvel Studios under Paramount and eventually Disney, which created the vast and sweeping Marvel Cinematic Universe... which could never include the X-Men, because those were Fox's action figures to play with.
The possibility of a crossover film featuring both of Marvel's most famous hero teams became substantially more likely in 2019, after Marvel's parent company Disney purchased Fox and its properties for more than $70 billion. According to a source who spoke to We Got This Covered, Marvel plans to slowly introduce X-Men characters into the MCU as it crafts more films around a new, second-generation Avengers squad (including Black Panther, Shang-Chi, and Scarlet Witch) before it can lead up to a movie featuring both teams.
Spider-Man and Venom
For years, Spider-Man was caught in a web of rights issues. Sony bought the film rights to the friendly neighborhood web-slinger and associated characters years before Marvel started making their own movies, and subsequently made a hit trilogy starring Tobey Maguire, and then two mixed-bag adventures with Andrew Garfield. By the time Sony rebooted the franchise again with Spider-Man: Homecoming starring Tom Holland, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had launched, and Disney and Marvel had to carefully work out a deal with Sony to feature Spidey — a Marvel Comics creation — in those movies. In 2019, the rival studios worked out one last arrangement: they'd co-finance one more MCU-based Spider-Man movie with Holland, and then the sole rights would go back to Sony.
But Sony still controls the film rights to more than 900 Marvel heroes, and they've been developing what they call "Sony's Universe of Marvel Characters." Included in that: 2018's blockbuster hit Venom. An origin story for a Peter Parker foe, Tom Hardy starred as alien-symbiote-possessed reporter Eddie Brock (a.k.a. Venom). With both Spider-Man and one of the franchise's most popular villains in its stable, Sony would certainly consider pairing them up in a crossover movie. "That's where it's all going to lead," Venom director Ruben Fleischer told Fandom (via IndieWire). "In the comics, he evolved from Spider-Man but because of the Marvel-Sony thing we weren't able to do that. And so the thing I think it's building towards, and will be exciting to see, is when they actually do confront each other."
Bloodshot and Harbinger
The success of movies based on properties from comic book publishers Marvel and DC led studios to explore the cinematic possibilities of characters from other, lesser-known houses. That's why Sony has designs on a cinematic series featuring properties from Valiant Entertainment. First up is the studio's 2020 adaptation of Bloodshot, starring Vin Diesel as a scientifically-enhanced, indestructible superhero under the control of a shady corporation. Plans were in place to complement Bloodshot with Harbinger, about a group of teenage superheroes fighting against an evil organization seeking to exploit their abilities. Two Bloodshot movies and two Harbinger installments would then lead into an Avengers-style crossover epic called Harbinger Wars, featuring characters from both worlds (and based on a Valiant series published in 2013).
But by 2019, the possibility of a Valiant universe seemed unlikely due to the complicating issue of rights. Sony kept the rights to Bloodshot but passed Harbinger over to Paramount. If Harbinger Wars comes to pass, the two studios will have to reach a very tricky deal, similar to the one between Marvel and Sony when the former wanted to get Spider-Man, a Sony-controlled character, into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Oz and Wonderland
They're two of the most iconic and influential franchises in fantasy fiction, in both book and movie form: L. Frank Baum's stories set in the merry old land of Oz, and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Baum wrote more than a dozen Oz books between 1900 and 1920, while Carroll's Wonderland adventures appeared in the 19th century and are so perennially popular and beloved that they've been adapted for the screen hundreds of times.
Other than weird things happening to tween girls lost in fantastical worlds of whimsy, Oz and Alice don't have much in common, but that doesn't mean Hollywood can't combine them. In 2017, Netflix acquired a script called Dorothy and Alice written by a California teacher named Justin Merz in which Dorothy is sent to a home for emotionally troubled children, where she meets Alice, both fearful their fantasy lands are in danger. In 2019, screenwriter Anna Klassen announced that she'd been hired to rewrite the script, which could be the first of several Netflix original films teaming up the classic heroines.
Django and Zorro
Writer-director Quentin Tarantino loves to make new movies in old genres that don't get a lot of respect. For example: Jackie Brown feels like a '70s crime movie, Death Proof is a drive-in-worthy horror movie, and Django Unchained is a gritty, revenge-driven, Italian-style Western. It should come as no surprise, then, that Tarantino is interested in Zorro, a character who jumped off the pages of early 20th century pulp paperbacks to take his vigilante heroics in 1800s Spanish California to the formulaic cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.
In 2013, Tarantino, collaborating with Matt Wagner, co-wrote Django/Zorro, a sequel to Django Unchained in the form of a seven-issue comic book miniseries that finds the bounty hunter portrayed by Jamie Foxx going to work as a bodyguard for the masked and mysterious Zorro. In 2019, Collider reported that this print crossover is in the process of becoming a film crossover, too. Tarantino brought on comedian Jerrod Carmichael to help him craft a screenplay based on the comic series. It's unclear if Tarantino would direct the eventual (and so far theoretical) Django/Zorro movie, as he's promised to retire after his tenth film.
Godzilla and King Kong
Not only is there a new epic monster movie battle of the ages crossover coming up, but it also marks the completion of a trilogy. After rampaging through the world and destroying life and property in 2014's Godzilla and 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the titular green kaiju will once again wreak havoc in Godzilla vs. Kong.
It's a throwback to the classic Japanese-made Godzilla movies, in which the big guy fought against all kinds of other gigantic mutant monsters, such as the butterfly-like Mothra and brutish, birdish Rodan. And while those creatures, along with the building-scaling ape himself, have appeared in recent installments of Legendary Pictures' MonsterVerse, Godzilla: King of the Monsters will mark the first time some 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla that the two most famous movie monsters will officially wage war against each other. Godzilla vs. Kong, which also stars humans such as Alexander Skarsgard, Millie Bobby Brown, and Kyle Chandler, hits theaters in November 2020.