For years, it seemed like the X-Men and Avengers would never cross paths on the big screen. After all, Fox held the rights to the mutants and Fantastic Four, and a full-blown collaboration really wasn’t in the cards. That all changed when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, paving the way for Marvel Studios to bring so many iconic characters into the fold. It’s taken a few years to get the ball rolling, but there’s been major progress in the last couple of years, with Deadpool and Wolverine finally getting a team-up and the Fantastic Four gearing up to join the fray.
Even bigger things are on the horizon as well, including an X-Men reboot helmed by Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier with a script by The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes writer Michael Lesslie. But they aren’t the only creatives with their eyes on mutant-led properties. In fact, Jeremy Slater, the creator of Disney+’s Moon Knight and a writer on 2015’s Fantastic Four, wants the chance to bring an underrated Marvel team to life.
While speaking exclusively to ComicBook.com, Slater was asked about a character or team in the Marvel Universe he would want to get his hands on. “The one I always wanted was Excalibur,” he revealed. “Excalibur came out right around the time I was comic book collecting and that was my number one read. My military base always had issues of Excalibur, Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four. Then it had the Claremont Uncanny reprints. X-Men Classic, I think it was called.”
Excalibur was a team of heroes that got their start in the late 1980s when the X-Men were presumed dead. The roster was made up of a few high-profile mutant characters, such as Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, and Rachel Summers, as well as Captain Britain. Excalibur operated mostly in the United Kingdom but would travel wherever they thought there was someone in need.
The idea of mutants going off on their own appealed to Slater. “It’s such an insane book,” he said. “Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde are my two favorite X-Men, so the idea of doing something with the two of them and setting it against this multi-versal backdrop of the Warwolves … and they had a great villains roster. They were creative and unafraid to be weird. And the soap-opera dynamics of the characters were really fun and really juicy.”
While it may be some time before Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde are ready to take center stage in the MCU, the idea of an Excalibur project is enticing, especially if it ends up on Disney+, where Slater believes it should be.
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The idea of taking the MCU to the small screen after Avengers: Endgame seemed like a good one. After all, there were a lot of loose threads and only so many slots for movies. While the experiment worked at first, Disney+’s Marvel shows eventually hit a wall, which forced the powers that be to scale back. These days, there are fewer Marvel Studios shows releasing on Disney’s streaming platform, and the ones that do end up there don’t really connect to what’s going on in the movies.
Things don’t have to stay this way forever. If Marvel Studios is smart, it will flesh out the X-Men on the big screen before giving individual members their own projects. But rather than having a Shadowcat series, it can fold her story into an Excalibur show that shines a light on multiple mutants. The team can have their own adventures and return to the X-Mansion when it’s time for an event movie.
Would you be interested in watching an Excalibur show? What characters do you hope end up on the team? Let us know in the comments below!
With a second season of Moon Knight unconfirmed, the show’s creator is interested in bringing another Marvel property to life. Read More