Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-100762-20160301113532/@comment-100762-20160301221937

I'm not saying the cross-over is official yet, or even guaranteed. All I am saying is that the two franchises appear to be avoiding each other's chronological territories in such a way that there have been virtually no contradictions.

Regarding the mutation aspect, the cinematic universes were not originally designed to be merged so the mutant aspect will have to be dealt with in some manner. Fortunately, there is still a 25 year gap after Apocalypse to find such a solution. My thought is that mutants will be downplayed or perhaps even suppressed in a sort of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" manner, probably in the 1990s and maybe even under Clinton, just to make the comparison that much more overt. Or there could be some mass epidemic that kills off large populations of mutants. Or the number of mutants could be considerably less than implied in the original X-Men Trilogy (we are on a different timeline, after all). Xavier's school, and others like it, could become government-sanctioned half-way houses for mutants – places where they are considered safe.

Despite the obvious mutant involvement in 1963, only the events of 1973 really made it on the news in Earth-TRN414 so those could be easily downplayed. I imagine Apocalypse may also provide an easy out for mutants in the MCU by having many killed and others going into hiding. The mutant "threat" could become such that they are nearly forgotten a generation later or the memory of them could inspire some of the ever-present public fear of superheroes found in the MCU. The MCU government could even play up (through careful retconning) the fact that virtually all the Avengers & Co. are the products of scientific experiments or other technological creations. And the Chitauri invasion can act as a wake-up call that there are bigger threats out there, further helping suppress the lingering fear of mutants, possibly in favour of more troublesome Inhumans and other creations of science.

All I'm saying is that as the two universes still stand, it would not take too much retconning to combine the two universes together, and I think both studios are doing this intentionally. I'm not saying they are formally merged yet – hence why there have been no mutants or references to them in the MCU and no Avengers in the X-Men – I'm just saying that the two studios are intentionally not overlapping content whenever possible (Quicksilver excepted).