Why Marvel vs Capcom 4 is never coming

Squishing shoulders!

The Marvel vs Capcom series is my favorite series of videogames. Frantic action, screen filling visuals, and recognizable characters all come together to create something truly special.


X-Men: Children of the Atom, the first in what would become the series, hit 20 December of last year. The historical context is important.

Marvel was at the height of a comics bubble that was about to crash the entire market. However, they had found great success in licencing their properties into cartoons, especially Fox's X-Men. And so, they licenced Capcom to make a fighting game.

Capcom was also riding a boom: a Sonic Boom. The success of Street Fighter 2 had created wave of imitators that became the fighting game genre. While the Street Fighter brand remained strong, Capcom did began to diversify it's fighting game output, uncluding 1994's Darkstalkers.

X-Men: Children of the Atom was a big success, and begat Marvel Super Heroes, a game taking on the general Marvel universe, which eventually led to a series of  crossovers with Capcom that became known as the Vs Series, starting with X-Men vs Street Fighter.

The latest game, released in 2011, might be called Marvel vs Capcom 3, but it's really either the 5th game in a crossover tag-team series or the seventh game in Capcom's Superhero fighting game series, depending on how you want to look at it. Whether that would also include Capcom's other crossover's with Japanimation company Tatsunoko, rival company SNK, or with Tekken, well, that'a also up to the reader, as the mechanics are sufficiently distinct as to consider them separate.

So what do we have to look forward to in the series? Well, things have changed a bit. The fighting game genre isn't quite as booming as in the early 90's, is it? Most of the franchises that set up shop there are already gone. Capcom itself is now in the position Marvel was back then, of trying to license it's product into movies. It's found great success with Resident Evil(in that, and in general)  and is currently busy promoting Street Fighter 5.

Marvel, however, has changed, too. It saw so much success from licensing it's works into movies, it started doing the movies themselves. And THAT was so successful, Disney bought it.

Disney's plans for Marvel in terms of videogames seems to ever less involve licensing out, and more to involve natively making works. While that may eventually change in the over 40 years that most of these characters will remain copyrighted, the sad reality is that it probably won't.

Curiously, within this next decade, most of the characters from Silver Age would already be lapsing, according to the laws of their day.  This includes Spider-Man, Galactus, and most of the original X-Men. While Capcom would certainly not be able to use the word "Marvel" in the title, it would sure enough be able to use Spider-Man and Cyclops in an ensemble cast of sorts. Captain America, having been made in the 40's, could have already been in a game.

So I'm not trying to say Marvel vs Capcom 4 is a casualty of long copyright, but it's certainly keeping these characters out of the public's use. Would YOU like for Captain America, Marvel Girl, and Galactus to be public domain before the 2050s? Chime in below!