Do the various copyrights and licences for movies and franchising held by companies like Fox and Sony put a block on what FFG can produce for Marvel Champions?

Specifically, can FFG introduce X-Men and Fantastic Four characters to Marvel Champions?

I think Fox and Sony only had movie rights, nothing else. I believe Evan from FFG has mentioned that no character is off limits, it’s just a matter of if and when they might show up in the game.

Besides, Disney owns FOX now.

It's clear from the latest interviews that the designers want to but are not allowed to do X-men. But I think that has to do with higher ups or even Disney and not necessarily the licence itself.

11 minutes ago, Deadwolf said:

It's clear from the latest interviews that the designers want to but are not allowed to do X-men. But I think that has to do with higher ups or even Disney and not necessarily the licence itself.

I don't know, but to me that seemed like a dead giveaway to me. Michael Boggs seems to me to be fairly well at keeping things secret, good poker face. But he seemed really fond and almost proud of the idea of an ice-man hero. It could be because of just pure favoritism, but I think that he will be coming in the next big box. Which would have a perfect set-up if the last heroes for the silhouettes are indeed, Quick Silver and Scarlet Witch. I think Michael Boggs designed Ice Man and has him already completely play tested. All though, it would be weird to me that he would dabble into that for so long in the AMA, if he's as good as every one says. Who knows? Maybe he's just now designing him? But I doubt it.

While I could see him trying to throw us off a bit, it seems more likely to me that he was telling the truth. They’re probably waiting until a little closer to whenever Mutants join the MCU, for broader market appeal/casual fan recognition. Just like Avengers are a big name right now in pop culture, and they should do GotG before they get cold (GotG3 coming in a few years should help with that either way).

Who knows if it’s Disney or just FFG but somebody with some say in what the designers get to create recognizes that—while a large portion of this game’s audience is familiar with and may want the X-Men—it’s more likely to sell well if they wait. Not to mention if the game hits a lull in sales In a couple years, an X-Men box would be a great way to revive the game.

I’d love to be wrong and see those characters sooner, but I wouldn’t count on it.

(Plus there’s a decent chance Pietro and Wanda won’t have the Mutant trait, thanks to comic retcons. So they’re hardly a good indicator of X-Men coming up immediately.)

12 hours ago, Deadwolf said:

It's clear from the latest interviews that the designers want to but are not allowed to do X-men.

This is what struck me in the interview and prompted me to post this thread.

Though I cannot know why this was alluded to in the stream, it struck me that there was some sort of stumbling block (beyond FFG scheduling for the game) currently preventing future development of X-Men for Marvel Champions.

On a positive note; I was encouraged that Michael Boggs mentioned Ghost Rider and Moon Knight as hero names he'd noted were popular amongst forum/media posters.

Either Caleb or Boggs has specifically stated in at least one interview that nothing in the Marvel catalog is off-limits. Print rights have nothing to do with movie rights; if they did, Marvel wouldn't be able to release any comics for characters whose movie rights currently belong to somebody else. You can see other examples of how different copyrights are split up in DVD and digital distribution of TV shows and movies. Most obvious are older TV shows that use popular copyrighted music as theme songs. For instance, the theme song to Married... with Children is Frank Sinatra's "Love and Marriage" and had to be replaced on some seasons for the DVD and streaming releases because the initial rights contracts never took those mediums into account and, for whatever reason, the powers that be couldn't work out a deal after they became common.

In the last live stream AMA, Boggs did say that they do take into account the movie release schedule when choosing heroes. He also mentioned that they have about 20 heroes in the pipeline right now. Sadly (for me), it didn't sound like Daredevil or Punisher are anywhere in that list.

25 minutes ago, maniakmedic said:

Sadly (for me), it didn't sound like Daredevil or Punisher are anywhere in that list.

We wont be be seeing X-men and FF4 anytime soon but anyone else is fair game. There are actually only a handful of heroes that are obviously Justice and those 2 heroes are the most popular heroes on that short list. So it really wouldn't surprise me to see them sooner rather than later.

I think there just wanting to start with a heavy Avengers tilt because of them being more well know to the general public due to the MCU.

12 hours ago, SpiderMana said:

While I could see him trying to throw us off a bit, it seems more likely to me that he was telling the truth. They’re probably waiting until a little closer to whenever Mutants join the MCU, for broader market appeal/casual fan recognition. Just like Avengers are a big name right now in pop culture, and they should do GotG before they get cold (GotG3 coming in a few years should help with that either way).

But if it's semi based off of the MCU, who are they gonna do? FFG is releasing a product once a month, while Marvel studios won't have another movie out until September! There's going to be more FFG products then heroes in the MCU soon. They'll have to branch off soon. If they do wait for the X-men to come into the MCU, what Avenger heroes are they going to add? They could do the Defenders, but there's only 4 of them. Guardians of the Galaxy has 5 members, counting only one reincarnation. They have 20 already completely done. It seems almost impossible to me to stay with the MCU. The MCU are doing the Avengers mostly, not the Marvel comics which this game is based around. These franchises have different goals for there own universes.

1 minute ago, Hyperjayman said:

I think there just wanting to start with a heavy Avengers tilt because of them being more well know to the general public due to the MCU.

But how much more Avengers do they have? They'll have to move into a different direction soon.

44 minutes ago, Deadwolf said:

We wont be be seeing X-men and FF4 anytime soon but anyone else is fair game. There are actually only a handful of heroes that are obviously Justice and those 2 heroes are the most popular heroes on that short list. So it really wouldn't surprise me to see them sooner rather than later.

Boggs did answer a question somebody asked regarding whether we'd be seeing street-level heroes like Daredevil anytime soon. I don't remember exactly what his answer was, but it was something along the lines of it's possible but we'll see. I need to go back and watch it again.

2 minutes ago, Venompuppy said:

But how much more Avengers do they have? They'll have to move into a different direction soon.

Well they’ve done the current Wave 1 Avengers, all the heroes people currently think of as Avengers. I think this will be followed by a wave 2, lesser known but still familiar Antman, Wasp, the Maximoff twins. After that I think they’ll tie it off with a few more familiar Avengers like Vision, Falcon etc... I think this third wave will be mixed up with newer comic characters that Marvel is trying to push like Miles Morales, Spider-Gwen, Iron heart, Robbie Reyes those types of characters.

I think this will be followed by The Guardians either through a story box or a mix of hero packs, followed by another mix of the Defenders and other Marvel Knights. This is just based off of existing MCU content and current in game artwork. Only after all of this do I think X-Men/FF will even be on the horizon.

This is all just my thoughts based off of what I think FFG is doing, which is using the MCU as a skeleton for their pseudo cycles and using it as a bridge to connect to other heroes in the Marvel comic universe. I could be and probably will be horrendously incorrect but hey, who knows.

25 minutes ago, KimJoshIl said:

I think this third wave will be mixed up with newer comic characters that Marvel is trying to push like Miles Morales, Spider-Gwen, Iron heart, Robbie Reyes those types of characters.

I don't think we'll be seeing Miles soon. Somebody asked a question regarding the release of the different alter-ego version of heroes we already have and Boggs said it'll be a while because there are so many other heroes we haven't seen any version of. I'd imagine we'll eventually see them, but Marvel does have a huge catalog to draw from and, as much as I'd love to see different versions of certain heroes, at this early stage in the game's life I'd like to see a wider selection.

50 minutes ago, Venompuppy said:

They could do the Defenders, but there's only 4 of them. Guardians of the Galaxy has 5 members, counting only one reincarnation.

There's been plenty of Defenders and Guardians down the years. Though FFG is mostly coinciding releases with popular MCU characters, they've made it clear that Marvel Champions has sixty years of comic book history at its disposal.

My impression was not that they couldn't do them soon, but that they wouldn't do them soon since they have alot of other stuff in the release cycle. This game seems to be concentrating on elements of Marvel that has or will appear in live action. Legendary just released a New Mutants box presumably to coincide with the movie so clearly Disney isn't opposed to board games using Mutants, and Marvel publishing has been pushing X-Men hard lately. If FFG didn't have the rights then they would just say so. Andrew back when this game was first released was pretty explicit in saying everything was on the table, but some things are just not planned right now, which reinforces my impression. This game does have a relatively slow release cycle with a hero/villain per month on average. So they are forced to pace themselves and be very selective. This feels to me like the studio is making a decision to be focused on the current hotness in pop culture. That would be the MCU movie related characters and the upcoming Disney+ shows. As much as I love The New Mutants (it was my favorite X title growing up) I can appreciate that the movie is bound to have less of a culture impact than the MCU shows.

If they wanted to they could go years on just Avengers, GotG and Defenders stuff in reality. Those teams have had giant roster lists accumulate over the years. It's almost easier to list the characters that have never been Avengers than the ones that have at this point. If you merge Defenders with Heroes for Hire which is pretty much what Netflix did then you also get a pretty sizable list of heroes. While the movie going audience only sees a handful of GotG characters between the two incarnations in the comic the list for that is quite sizable as well. So while I also love Mutants for me there's plenty of other stuff to get hyped about.

I'd love if we got to see some of the more obscure characters in the game if and when they went down the GotG rabbit hole. They need to give us a Cosmo hero. Cosmo is the best and even in the modern comics they seem to like to ignore his historical contributions to GotG. Who wouldn't want to play as a psychic cosmonaut dog that rises to the rank of head of security on a space station. Also designers if you want to know why some people are hyped about Nova then read Annihilation and Annihilation Conquest. That's pretty much his two defining events in recent Marvel history. As much as I love the New Warriors, the Annihilation events is what brought him center stage into being a big Marvel personality. Though after Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning exited I feel like no one has really captured the character again unfortunately. I think that is more of a symptom of the success of GotG the movie. They really took the Star Lord character and folded in elements from both Peter Quill and Richard Rider. That probably explains why Richard Rider still has yet to appear in a GotG movie even though we've seen Novas and Xandar. Also that and his Nova Prime motivation of being a hero for the rest of the galaxy as opposed to an earth-centric hero is kinda taken up by Captain Marvel in the MCU. So he's a real challenge if they wanted to do him in the MCU and not make him feel redundant with these movie versions of the characters. Then when they brought Peter Quill back in the comics he was straight up Chris Pratt's version so that kinda unseated Richard again when they brought him back in the print comics. I'm not completely unsympathetic. Juggling all these characters and making sure they are all relevant is no small task. I could talk for days on this...

3 hours ago, Deadwolf said:

There are actually only a handful of heroes that are obviously Justice and those 2 heroes are the most popular heroes on that short list.

Punisher? Obviously... Justice?? Like I get that he's motivated by some sense of justice, but I think he's much more likely to come with aggression 😜

3 hours ago, Venompuppy said:

They have 20 already completely done. It seems almost impossible to me to stay with the MCU.

1. Vision
2. Falcon
3. Winter Soldier
4. Ghost Rider (appears in Agents of SHIELD)
5. Moon Knight (getting a Disney+ show)
6. Starlord
7. Gamora
8. Drax
9. Rocket
10. Groot
11. Mantis
12. Nebula
13. Daredevil (Netflix shows are also MCU)
14. Jessica Jones
15. Luke Cage
16. Iron Fist
17. Misty Knight
18. Colleen Wing
19. Punisher
20. Blade (MCU movie announced)

I don't think any of those are a stretch at all for what we could see in the next couple years, plus we've got the Eternals and Shang-Chi coming out. Plus I believe he said 20 releases, as in for every ~4 hero packs we're probably getting a scenario pack and a story box. Still averages out to 1 hero per release, roughly (I think story boxes could squeeze in a third hero if they wanted).

56 minutes ago, SpiderMana said:

Punisher? Obviously... Justice?? Like I get that he's motivated by some sense of justice, but I think he's much more likely to come with aggression 😜

Every character has a motive and a method. Motive is why they do things and Method is how they do things.

Punisher's motive is rooted in Justice, but his method is very much aggression. Therefore both aspects would fit.

Black Widow on the other hand has a motive of Protection and a method of Justice. That's why her ally is Protection but her deck is Justice (could have gone either way but Justice deck better fit their needs).

I think we'll see Vision, Falcon, Winter Soldier and Nick Fury hero packs to round out Avengers arc. If Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch have the mutant/ X men trait that might give a clue to the next arc, otherwise I'm thinking the 2nd campaign box might be a Defenders vs Kingpin/Bullseye etc content.