Cut Fantastic Four Rant/Speculation

During Stan Lee’s tenure as a writer for Marvel in the 1960s, The Fantastic Four was one of the first on-going series he had complete creative control over alongside artist Jack Kirby. It was with the Fantastic Four that Lee was able to establish his approach towards creating superheroes that felt like real people the audience could relate to despite their super powered status. This writing approach with the Fantastic Four proved to be very successful, and it paved the way for Lee’s other co-creations, including Spider-Man himself, who he created alongside artist Steve Ditko. As a matter of fact, the very first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1963 had Peter infiltrating the Baxter Building in an attempt to *join* the Fantastic Four. Ever since, Spider-Man has remained extremely close with the Fantastic Four, with the Human Torch in particular being regarded as one of his best friends.

At the time of this game’s development, Disney and Marvel had an anti X-Men/Fantastic Four mandate going on that prevented the characters from being featured in any Marvel products, since Disney didn’t own the film rights to those franchises. This resulted in all comics related to the X-Men and Fantastic Four being canceled for a few years, and the characters from those franchises were forbidden from appearing in any form of Marvel-related products, including video games like Marvel vs Capcom Infinite. It was a very shitty and embarrassing period for Marvel, and made me loathe the fact that the company is owned by Disney even more than I already did at the time. I’m wondering if the Baxter Building was excluded from Marvel’s Spider-Man because of that ban, but considering two of the additional Spider-Man suits you can unlock in the game include The Amazing Bag-Man, which is literally just Peter wearing a spare Fantastic Four uniform with a bag over his head, and the Future Foundation suit, which was a team that was formed by Fantastic Four characters, it’s hard to say whether or not this was the case. Since Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox began in 2017, and the ban on these characters being lifted shortly after, it might be possible Insomniac Games were able to get away with adding these suits towards the end of development, but weren’t able to add the Baxter Building to the map. This is all just speculation on my part though.