Following the lukewarm reception of Fantastic Four, 20th Century Fox seems poised to shift focus to a project generating far more enthusiasm: Deadpool. Early buzz around the film is overwhelmingly positive, and producer Simon Kinberg is confident it will deliver everything fans are hoping for — and more.
The early positive feedback seems to have inspired momentum for more.
According to Kinberg, discussions about a Deadpool sequel were already underway during production of the first film. “We were talking about the sequel while we were making the movie,” he said. “Just because when you make a film like this that’s from a serialized source material, you hope that it’s the first of many… [Fox is] feeling good about it, we’re all feeling really proud of it.”
In the with Collider, Kinberg praised the film’s tone, execution, and its firm commitment to staying true to the character’s roots.
“I have seen a rough cut of Deadpool and it’s fantastic. It’s a really good movie. It delivers on the promise of the trailer,” he said. “We really committed and leaned into it being R-rated. It’s just darker and edgier and weirder in the best way — like Deadpool should be — than any other movie in the genre.”
When asked whether fan-favorite character Cable might appear in future installments, Kinberg kept expectations grounded. “It’s certainly come up because he’s such a big character in the world,” he explained. “But yeah, we’re in such the early stages of sequel talk it would be genuinely premature for me to say whether or not he was gonna be in it.”
Beyond the Deadpool sequel, Kinberg also addressed Fox’s broader plans for the X-Men cinematic universe, suggesting that the studio is working to establish a more cohesive shared timeline across its Marvel properties. Speaking with MTV, he explained, “The idea is that we’ve sort of reset the timeline after Days of Future Past in some ways… Everything we set now becomes canon.”
He continued, “So the Gambit movie, the Deadpool movie, will exist in a world that acknowledges whatever happened in Days of Future Past and moving forward… There will be interplay between different characters in different movies.”
With Deadpool gaining strong early reactions and a clear direction for future expansion, Fox may be establishing its own interconnected franchise — a kind of Fox Marvel Cinematic Universe, or FMCU. While the idea of a crossover with Marvel Studios remains appealing to fans, Fox appears to be finding its own identity through risk-taking and genre-bending storytelling.
Whether the R-rated humor and violence of Deadpool would ever be embraced in the family-friendly MCU is debatable. But for now, it looks like Fox is carving out a unique space of its own — and it starts with Deadpool.