I grew up on 60's and 70's hand-me-down comics so naturally I'm of the mind that what they've done with the fantastic four in films is a crime against humanity. Without the fantastic four, Marvel is missing the movie rights to Dr. Doom. If they were going to get the franchise back I think it would have already happened. Marvel ended the publication a few years ago in what I assume was a way to give Fox the finger after a failed negotiation. It must just be ransom because Fox clearly has no idea how to make money off of FF.

In those old comics there are times where Reed slaps Susan in the face. Didn't age well.

There are some signs that X-Men is starting to leak back into mainstream Marvel. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are pseudo X-Men. Fox had squeezed just about everything out of the X-Men storylines until they opened up another gold mine with Deadpool. Back in the 90's when Marvel first sold the X-Men film rights, X-Men and Spiderman were the only titles keeping Marvel afloat. In an effort to use that X-Men popularity to give their other characters a boost, they had this big event called the Onslaught Saga that mixed all these other titles into this X-Men plotline. If Marvel were to acquire X-Men film rights tomorrow, they'd need to do a movie like that.