If there’s one thing consistent about Marvel, the comic book publisher, it’s that they want their comics to reflect the movies their studio arm puts out as much as possible. Because Fox owns the rights to all the mutants, and Marvel is currently trying to make anybody who might be a mutant into an Inhuman, that raises a question of what to do with all these X-Men books that Marvel keeps selling by the crate. Apparently, the answer is to just stick ’em in an alternate universe.
Most of this speculation is built around Marvel’s Axel Alonso’s interview with Comic Book Resources:
The X-Men office is taking the opportunity of “Secret Wars” to build an entire new world for the characters — to create a shared universe within the X-books that’s set off by a huge event/incident/surprise. At that point, they’re going to introduce a new team that feels unlike anything you’ve seen before. It’ll be… “extraordinary.”
That combined with a book announced called the “Uncanny Inhumans” and Marvel using their totally-not-a-reboot Secret Crisis, ah, sorry, Secret Wars to basically revive what people liked and bury what they didn’t, would seem to point towards a reboot where the mutants have their own playground and the rest of Marvel’s books would be more like the movies.
To be honest… I’ll believe it when I get the solicits. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility, and let’s face it, this is far from either the most ridiculous or the most confusing thing Marvel’s ever done to their mutant characters. And it may actually happen. But if it does, I suspect that this particular experiment won’t last for long. People just like the mutants too much not to involve them in everything.