The big news this week in comic-book land is the completion of Disney’s purchase of the Fox Studios Marvel character portfolio. For the superhero movie fan, this means simply that Marvel (owned by Disney) now has full creative control over the X-Men and related characters, as well as Marvel’s First Family, The Fantastic Four! To the long-suffering comic book geek fan (like me), this is nirvana. This unification opens up many possibilities for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Given the long history of interactions between the Avengers and the X-Men in the Marvel (comics) Universe (MU), the potential for mining that rich history to create new movie and television epics involving these two important groups is huge. NOTE: In the comics, the X-Men and the Avengers, whose comics debuted at the same time (September, 1963), first met in X-Men #9 (Jan. 1965), have had sometimes acrimonious relations, with multiple instances of serious fighting between the two groups.

Having said that though, one major question in this Marvel movie merger mayhem, is what will happen to the existing X-Men movie characters, their canon, and their continuity?  At this point, we do not really know how Disney/Marvel will treat what has come before, but this week we did get the news that Ryan Reynolds’ version of Deadpool IS being kept by Disney/Marvel.  This was celebrated by Ryan Reynolds on Twitter with a…Disney-fied image of the Merc With A Mouth…

The next day, Chris Hemsworth, who has played Thor in eight MCU films thus far, welcomed the Regenerating Degenerate into the Marvel Cinematic family with his own imagery on Instagram…

Regardless of how the new, unified Marvel Cinematic Universe plays out (and what about the potential for a Spider-Man/Deadpool Team-Up?  Remember, the Spidey/Deadpool comic book series has been one of Marvel’s most popular comic book series over the past couple of years), the future looks VERY bright for Marvel fans.