Everybody wants to play in the pool that Marvel is building over at Disney. Even Hugh Jackman. But saying you want to do something is a far cry from actually doing it.
In the lead up to the release of X-Men: Days of Future Past (or X:DOFTP as it is commonly referred to online where character space is at a premium and reading ability is at an all time low) Jackman happily chats up how cool it would be if his character, Wolverine, showed up in an Avengers movie.
According to the ever vigilante and professional Variety as they quote another source which I now quote here:
“I would love to see him as part of ‘The Avengers,’” Jackman told IGN. “Because there’s a great dysfunction among that team, and I think Wolverine would fit right into that. He’d like that.”
He then upped the ante by dragging the big green one into the conversation:
“There’s no doubt he’d get in a fight with Hulk at some point,” he said. “Those two bad, rage-filled characters are going to square off at some point. It would be quite fun. I don’t know how much fun to shoot it would be, because I’m sure I’d be on the worst end of it, but hey, he can heal.”
The problem with this kind of reporting (not so much by a site like ours or a site like IGN because it is our job and place in the ecosystem to get super crazy around the minutiae of these geeky properties), is that a site like Variety should be more upfront and indepth on the business sides about how low the possibilities of stuff like this coming to pass are. There is much more involved than Fox only having the rights currently.
The thing that is keeping stuff like this from happening, this studio red tape (as referenced in the Variety article), is that Marvel Studios is at the top of their game right now and they have no reason to support these other movies. Doing an inter-Studio crossover would open the gates for all kinds of business, financial, and creative complications (just look at the history of X-Men already, and Spider-Man’s much too quick reboot). And the sooner these other movies crash and fail, the sooner the rights revert back to Marvel where they can fit them into a somewhat more coherent structure.
I’m not saying it will never happen, but I am pretty sure that if at some point it does, it will be because Marvel has lost their edge and Kevin Feige is the new Chairman of Warner Brothers.