9 Mind Blowing "What If?" Scenarios That Almost Changed Comics Forever

6. Marvel Don't Sell Their Most Profitable Characters

It's the world's worst-kept secret that Marvel aren't at all happy with the way in which Fox have gone about using the X-Men or the Fantastic Four on the big-screen. They tried to replace the mutants with the Inhumans in the comics for a bit (and failed), and the poor old Fantastic Four have been fragmented and without a book for years now.

While omitting these characters from the comics themselves seems like a very futile way for Marvel to air their grievances with a multimillion dollar corporation, they do have cause to be upset. Every single Fantastic Four feature has been pretty terrible, and while the X-Men are back in everyone's good graces thanks to Deadpool and Logan, praise is somewhat off-set by the fact that, in the MCU, they'd be able to hang around with the Avengers.

It's a reality of Marvel's own making, however. Faced with bankruptcy in the nineties, the company sold most of the onscreen rights to their own characters to various studios and companies. Spider-Man, the X-Men, Daredevil and of course the Fantastic Four all wound up in different places, and - for a while at least - Marvel were fine with this. No one had predicted the meteoric rise of the comic book film as a force in Hollywood and Marvel, seemingly perturbed by their shaky finances, had an out in selling their properties to other Hollywood companies.

But what if they hadn't been so quick to sell their licenses? Well, for starters, the MCU would look a heck of a lot more differently, but there's also the fact that the comic book movie boom would've taken a completely different shape altogether, if it even took at all.