Marvel Officially Confirms Major Horror Crossover Plan

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Reed Richards and Sue Storm standing against cosmic entities on the cover of Midnight Fantastic Four

Published Oct 7, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT

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.

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.”

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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