By now everyone realizes that the cinematic rights to certain characters and franchise within the Marvel Pantheon are not actually held by Marvel Studios. They are spread out among several other major studios, most notably Sony and Fox, with those studios holding lucrative deals that allow them to keep the franchises so long as they are using them.
This means that as Marvel Studios blows everyone’s collective minds with their spectacular feature films, several key characters are off-limits to them. Up to this point that was not really a big deal because Marvel had plenty of their own marquee heroes and villains to play with. However, now Marvel is looking to expand into the cosmic corner of their universe with ‘Phase 2’ and the two most popular and known cosmic characters are currently held by Fox.
Under normal circumstances this would simply mean Marvel would have to find replacements for Galactus and Silver Surfer as they move forward with their cosmic phase, but timing might just be on their side. Fox is under a tight deadline to get their Daredevil reboot off the ground, and they just recently lost their director. Instead of simply scrabbling, Variety is reporting that Fox has proposed a trade with Marvel Studios to extend the Daredevil rights, a deal that would bring Galactus and Silver Surfer back home to Marvel.
