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.
And you might be surprised by some of the cinematic clashes potentially coming soon
to a theater near you.
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.
Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman has been linked to this multi-movie plan that’s compared
to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But with 5 years gone without a movie featuring the holographic Visionaries or transforming
vehicles of M.A.S.K., it could be that this crossover attempt has faced difficulties getting
off the ground.
"Oh great Cobra, we await thy bidding.
Give us a sign!"
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 almost every year, 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 and monsters.
The Power Rangers are in the Hasbro family, and rumor has it that Hasbro plans on combining
the property with another asset: the Transformers.
According to a supposed "insider" in contact with ComicBookMovie.com journalist Mikey Sutton
in September 2019, Hasbro wants both franchises to inhabit the same universe.
However, this would not be the Michael Bay Transformers, but rather the vision set forth
by the 2018 Transformers spinoff, Bumblebee.
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.
But that deal predates the development of Marvel Studios under Paramount and eventually
Disney, which created the vast and sweeping Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The possibility of a crossover film featuring the Avengers and X-Men 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 in August 2019, 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.
"Should we have name tags?
Well I'm Spider-Man and this is my trusty sidekick, Wolverine…"
"Don’t push it."
Sony bought the film rights to Spider-Man 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 an 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.
The success of Marvel and DC movies 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, a tale about 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.
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 beloved
that they've been adapted for the screen hundreds of times.
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.
Writer-director Quentin 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.
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 Django/Zorro movie, as he's promised
to retire after his tenth film.
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 bird-thing Rodan.
And while those creatures have appeared in recent installments of Legendary Pictures'
MonsterVerse, Godzilla: King of the Monsters will mark the first time since 1962's King
Kong vs. Godzilla that the two most famous movie monsters will officially wage war against
each other.
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