Marvel Officially Confirms Major Horror Crossover Plan
Ryan O'Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided's CubbiesCrib. Whether it's taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what's going on. Outside of entertainment, he's a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor's in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.
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For this spooky season, Marvel Comics is leaning fully into horror. This week marks the launch of the hotly anticipated Midnight Universe, a new imprint that gathers some of Marvel's best artists and writers to imagine a dark new reality where hope goes to die, and iconic heroes are twisted into monstrous new forms. All three of Midnight Spider-Man, Midnight X-Men, and Midnight Fantastic Four launch together on Wednesday, October 7, offering three very different types of horror and endless possibilities for how the typical rules the House of Ideas has run by for over 80 years can be bent and outright broken. Despite operating in separate sub-genres of the macabre, this is designed as an interconnected universe with "rich lore-building."
However, with the launch of a new universe, there naturally has to be some time taken to establish its corners. Phillip Kennedy Johnson and ScieTronc's Spider-Man story will first twist the origins of the web-slinger into a body-horror nightmare, twisting Peter Parker's mantra into "With great power comes something monstrous." Fantastic Four's Midnight debut, meanwhile, will have Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker take a cosmic approach to the First Family's origins before Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny ever came together as a unit, sending them beyond to unleash intergalactic terror. Finally, the X-Men are reimagined as blood-sucking creatures of the night, thanks to Jonathan Hickman and Matteo Della Fonte. There's so much to explore with each that, according to Hickman, a crossover isn't a high priority at the moment.
In a recent appearance on the Battle of the Atom podcast, the fan-favorite Fantastic Four writer teased the timeline for the Midnight Universe. While he did share that the creators have already outlined how they'll link the three stories, Marvel is in no rush for that big event to happen, opting to let each establish themselves before starting to lightly bring them together. "We have a plan for how the books are gonna touch," he said. "I would not expect that in the first ten months, but sometime around then, perhaps we’re gonna do something that might be pretty cool and the books might start, you know, lightly touching each other.”
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What MCU Superpower Would You Have? Strength · Spider-Sense · Invisibility · Chaos Magic
Eight honest questions about how you actually are: your first instinct when things go wrong, what your friends rely on you for, how you handle stress, what your real flaw is. Answer them and we will tell you which power you would wake up with. The best ones in the MCU are never random, because they always say something about the person who got them.
💪Super Strength(Hulk)
🕸️Spider-Sense(Spider-Man)
🫧Invisibility(Fantastic Four)
🔮Chaos Magic(Scarlet Witch)
01
What is your first instinct when something goes wrong? Go with the honest answer rather than the heroic one.
02
How do you handle being the centre of attention? Every hero on this list answers this differently.
03
What do your friends rely on you for? They would all name the same thing about you.
04
How do you deal with stress? Nobody picks the healthy one, and that is fine.
05
What is your actual flaw? The useful thing here is picking the true one.
06
What kind of help do you actually give people? Everybody has one default, whatever the situation is.
07
How do you want strangers to see you? Answer for the first ten minutes, not the first year.
08
What would you want a superpower for? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your power.
The Gift Is Given Your Power Is…
Four powers, and four completely different kinds of person behind them. Here is what you would wake up with, what it would cost you, and why the MCU keeps handing it to somebody exactly like you.
Super Strength
You get the power that is really about taking the hit so that nobody else has to. Strength in the MCU always lands on people who were already carrying too much, which is exactly why it suits you.
- Your instinct is to put yourself between the problem and the people, and you do it before anybody has thought to ask.
- Bruce Banner is the most interesting version of this because his story was never about lifting things, it was about control.
- The catch with strength is that people stop checking whether you are alright, since you have made a habit of looking like you always are.
- You would be the one everybody calls at two in the morning, and you would answer every single time.
Spider-Sense
You get the power that never switches off. Spider-sense is a gift and a nervous system on permanent alert, and the people who get it in these films are always the ones who were already worrying about everybody.
- You read a situation faster than you can explain it, and you are usually right in a way you cannot show your working for.
- Peter Parker is the template because he takes on more than he can hold and then apologises for not holding it well enough.
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrived in July 2026 and put him back to being local, broke and permanently on call.
- The cost here is real, since a power that warns you about everything also means you are never quite off duty.
Invisibility
You get the quietest power in the building, and quietly the most useful. Invisibility comes with force fields for a reason, because the people who prefer not to be seen are usually the ones holding a shield around everybody else.
- You notice everything, largely because you spend more time observing a room than performing in it.
- Sue Storm is the strongest member of her team and the least interested in anybody saying so, which is very much your energy.
- The Fantastic Four: First Steps finally gave the family a proper MCU home in 2025 and made her the centre of it.
- Your risk is that being unseen becomes a habit rather than a choice, and the people who love you would like a look in.
Chaos Magic
You get the biggest and least comfortable power on the list, the one that runs directly on feeling. Chaos magic is not really a superpower in the MCU so much as an emotional state with consequences attached.
- You feel things at a volume other people do not, and you have spent years managing that rather than being managed by it.
- Wanda is the best written character Marvel has, precisely because her power and her grief turned out to be the same thing.
- WandaVision remains the high point of Marvel television, and it works because the spectacle is only ever a symptom.
- The warning attached to this one is simple. A power that answers to how you feel is only ever as steady as you are.
Jonathan Hickman Changed 'Midnight X-Men' Because of His Fellow Writers
The last thing Hickman and the other creators want to see from the Midnight Universe is for their styles of horror to blend together too early and lose what makes them each unique. "It’s important that we not screw with the vibes here early on," he continued. While Marvel has dealt in horror before, these stories take things to new extremes and, more importantly, don't rely on their horror-adjacent characters from the canon, like Blade, Werewolf by Night, or Swamp Thing. They draw real terror from the powers that make their respective "heroes" unique in typical Marvel stories and result in mature stories that go beyond unleashing zombified versions of heroes.
Heading into the collaboration, Hickman wasn't sure exactly how far these horror stories would go until he saw what Percy was writing for The Fantastic Four. "I literally felt like I had to go back to the drawing board on what I was doing," he revealed. It was a breath of fresh air for him and inspired tweaks to his work to meet the standard the current Punisher writer had set. "I was like, 'Oh, we’re leaning that hard into this. Yes, let’s do that.' And it was very inspiring for me personally.” Hickman made his X-Men return a violent one, focusing on a New York teetering on the brink of a holy war between the vampires and mutant empyres, where the rest of humanity is caught in the middle to be feasted upon.
The first issues of Marvel Comics' Midnight Universe hit store shelves on October 7. Stay tuned here at Collider for more as the horror imprint develops. You can explore more books and comics with a free trial of Audible.
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