...including Spider-man, apparently.

If this is actually true, I suppose it could be simply a progression of the "what good are rules?" attitude that has served the current editorial team pretty well. They've had a big increase in Avengers sales by ignoring long-held beliefs about what characters make up that team. I'm not any kind of long-time X-men reader (or even current Marvel reader) so it certainly doesn't bother me. Admittedly though, I still think of Bendis' Avengers as less "real" than the classic Avengers, and I would suspect X-men fans would feel the same way about the random additions to their favorite team.

The cynical part of me, however, can't help but wonder if this is driven by movie deals. Maybe not explicitly, but still... Marvel/Disney essentially gets pennies on the dollar for most of their movie franchises... Spider-man, X-men, The Fantastic Four, etc. are all set up and owned in perpetuity by other studios. As long as those studios keep churning out movies based on the properties, they retain the rights to them. So essentially, Disney is never going to get the chance to make money off of X-men films, or Spider-man (outside of merchandise and publishing, certainly nothing to be sneezed at, but still). At least, not until other studios have run them into the ground enough to not even bother continuing them.

Is it really a surprise that since these deals have been in place, Marvel has focused on making the Avengers it's premiere title? That is the largest franchise they own in which they retain all the movie rights. I had long been wondering if the X-men, the former crown jewel of Marvel's franchises in sales, had been permanently relegated to the backseat because the profit that it could bring in was capped. Nearly all movie money from Wolverine films, or Deadpool films, or any number of X-men spin offs will go to Fox and not Disney. As a business model, it just didn't make sense for Marvel/Disney to focus their resources on putting that book back on top.

How to change that? Any new character created for the X-men would presumably go towards the Fox deal, or at best be unusable by Disney as-is for a film spin off. (I suspect Marvel isn't allowed to put out other films capitalizing on the concept of mutants, whether Fox has rights to the characters or not.)

Ah, but what if they stocked the X-men with non-mutant characters that Marvel still owned all rights to? I believe "Blade" movie rights are back with Marvel... lo and behold, he's now an X-man. That new She-Hulk? An X-man. Throwing Spidey on the team doesn't give them a spin-off option (Sony owns his rights) but it does make the new, random X-men a big deal well outside the usual comics audience. People with no understanding of the Marvel Universe can grasp the idea of Spider-man joining the X-men, and now you're bringing in new readers. You're also reigniting interest in Blade. Also possibly introducing a few other non-mutants to people, thus raising their value for possible future movies.

So maybe we can expect the Marvel Universe to get more homogeneous as a whole. Then, if X-men or Fantastic Four or Spider-man comics catch a new wave of popularity, there are characters within those comics that can be spun into money-making movie franchises for Marvel. Putting the X-men back on top doesn't hurt so much when it increases the value of characters still in Marvel's pockets.

Like I said, this is probably cynical thinking, and there was likely no overt plan along these lines... But I can't help but believe that it's a direction that the company as a whole would be encouraged to go.