Believe it or not there are people who still don't understand the laws of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the ins and outs of what characters can and can't be used. More importantly there is a demographic of people who don't believe certain stories can make it to the big screen without those constricted characters. But we've seen Marvel pull the switch before and adjust stories to what they own.
I've explained in the past the difference between comic book Ultron and movie Ultron, how Hank Pym created the former and Tony Stark created the latter, there can be more examples of this in the future. Take The Inhumans for example, this race of humans are endowed with powers that make them feared and hated by society, an easy replacement for The X-Men seeing as how 20th Century Fox owns the movie rights to X-Men. This could reach into Marvel's Illuminati as well, should that group ever make it into the films. The Illuminati were a group of Marvel's most intelligent heroes who joined in secrecy to prepare and converse over certain events in the Marvel Universe. Unfortunately, Mr Fantastic and Professor X are owned by Fox, and Namor the Sub-Mariner is tangled in legal complication which means if we get The Illuminati in the Marvel films we'd see other characters take their place. My guess? Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Black Bolt, Hank Pym and Nick Fury. And with The Illuminati in play the idea of a Hulk movie based off "Planet Hulk" is always a possibility. An event that could be hard to pull off would be "Secret Invasion" a story in Marvel in where an alien race called The Skrulls use their shapeshifting powers to take over the Earth from the inside. This story could make an interested overarching plot through Marvel's phase four or five, but the problem is The Skrulls are owned by Fox. Solution? Fox has stated they've wanted to make a TV show to tie into the X-Men movies, but-while they own the movies rights-Marvel owns X-Men's TV rights. So to pass the rights over maybe they could give The Skrulls movie rights to Marvel. Now that Marvel has the rights to Spider-Man back, The Dark Reign story-in which Norman Osborn/Green Goblin becomes the leader of SHIELD, takes Stark's armors and forms teams like The Dark Avengers and The Thunderbolts-is still on the table. With Scarlet Witch on The Avengers, stories like "Avengers Disassembled" can be done to reset The Avenger's roster if recasting is necessary.
Fox can play the replacement game too. The next Wolverine film is looking to be an adaptation of "Old Man Logan", but that story features characters like Hawkeye, Red Skull and The Hulk. Can't use them, so they could replace them with Longshot, Magneto and Sabretooth for example. "House of M" could be tricky as that story is about Scarlet Witch-who is under joint custody by Fox and Marvel-alters reality to make Mutants the dominant race. This can still be done, just with a smaller human resistance group. And after "X-Men: Days of Future's Past", time travel and reality alteration may not be wise.
It is too bad Marvel can't go all out with their stories because of the limitations they have, but we also must acknowledge that The Marvel Cinematic Universe is meant to be an easily assessable, streamlined version of the comic history, part of making things easier is changing the presentation. If Marvel can do a movie based on Civil War, but not be able to use Wolverine, I don't mind at all. At the end of the day, characters and ideas can be pulled from sixty years of source material to fit any film and we're lucky the people making these films are smart. Not like the guys over at Sony. Seriously guys, an Aunt May movie? What were you smoking? Thanks for reading!
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