Fantastic Four - Why Doesn't It Work?

Personally, I thought the first two Fox movies captured the FF pretty well; but it was the FF of 1963.  When FF first started in comics, it was not serious at all.  In an early story, Doctor Doom was defeated and left on an asteroid to die in deep space.  A few issues later, we open with a scene of Stan Lee working in his office when suddenly Doom bursts through the door.  Stan is shocked and exclaims "How did you escape that asteroid?!"; and his answer is "Doom explains himself to no man!" before Doom grabs the phone and crank calls Reed.   Seriously.  That was it; and that's what Fantastic Four was.

Despite it's world endangering plots, Fantastic Four was conceived to be light.  In truth, we have already had a very successful Fantastic Four movie - it was called The Incredibles.  Brad Bird embraced the concept for what it was meant to be and people loved it.  Of course, Bird also had the opportunity to put the Incredibles in a world populated with other heroes; and that is an element to Fantastic Four.  The FF has often served as a bridge book with all of Marvel's characters filtering in and out.

I was fine with the last FF attempt as well. They were no worse than any of the XMen movies and they could have easily blended those worlds.

This new movie was destined to fail. They probably only made it for the sake of keeping the rights away from Disney, and those making the movie never tried to appeal to the audience. The comic fans, as far as I've seen, were never behind this movie. The complaints over casting have been played off as racist in the press, but it is a legitimate complaint. They chose one of the two characters who were biologically related, thus altering that character on a very basic level.

The same thing is happening with Wally West. People want to see their beloved, iconic character. When you fundamentally change that character and turn them I to something new, you are essentially killing off the beloved icon without care and slapping their name on someone new.
I am not as upset about a black Wally West on the TV show as I am with what happened in the comics, but I do understand where fans are coming from.

With Fantastic 4, it was a sign that the people making it weren't doing it for the fans. The push back by the fans wasn't met with any care or concern, it was met with accusation. This movie was never going to succeed, because the studio was at war with the people that they wanted money from.

Based on the pictures I've seen, the movie looks pretty horrible anyway. So I don't think that they ever wanted to or expected to break the box office. It had to be about the rights.

Michael B. Jordan is a good actor, but he wasn't right for this part... Or this part wasn't right for him. And when people tried to say that, they were demonized and called racist. It is annoying because half of the casting notices put out have a specified race for characters. It is part of the job. But when an audience member brings it up, it suddenly becomes an issue.
But the thing is, people don't like the choice of Affleck for Batman either. We still have articles coming out with headlines about being stuck with Affleck for at least three films. There is no hidden agenda there, but it is the same complaint. If they manage to make it work, it will be an impressive stunt.
Ezra Miller is another example. Totally wrong for The Flash. And there is possibly more dislike for this casting than Affleck, because he isn't just wrong for the part, but most fans feel like the part has already been filled competently. I don't see how the filmmakers will make that right with the fans.

Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel were actually good. I liked them as fun comic book movies. But with this FF movie... I saw a commercial for the movie that didn't even show any clips. It doesn't strike me as something that was carefully made by people who were really excited about it.

Great actors in the movie. It is a shame that they were wasted.

Fair points. I did find those movies enjoyable. I thought they were fun... Not great movies by any means, but fun to watch. And they annoy me less than most of the Marvel movies just because nobody is acting as though they are better than they are.

Plus, I like Emma Stone. I'm not sure that I've watched any of her other movies, but I like her.

I haven't seen the movie. But I love Michael B. Jordan and am thrilled to see him in any role.

The whole FANTASTIC FOUR 2015 situation strikes me as downright SLIDERS-esque, especially with studio interference and various personality conflicts.

Season 1

• FOX wanted to retain the F4 rights but didn't care to invest strongly in the film. As with SLIDERS, their interference was random, sudden and last-minute. Just as production was about to begin, FOX mandated a tens of millions budget cut and the removal of three action sequences.

• As Tracy Torme with SLIDERS, Josh Trank had a strong vision for F4 as a grounded, low-key, hard-sci-fi reboot of the property as the 60s origin was based in the space race of the era.
  FOX and Trank agreed on Michael B. Jordan's casting as Johnny Storm.

• FOX and Trank disagreed on casting Miles Teller, but Trank won that battle.

• Trank did not want Kate Mara as Sue Storm, but FOX won that battle.

Season 2

• There were reports of Josh Trank being indecisive and giving contradictory instructions to set builders, prop designers and other crew.

• As with SLIDERS, there were reports of FOX giving contradictory mandates at late stages of preproduction, hence Trank's indecision.

• There were reports of Josh Trank making himself unavailable to communicate with cast, producers and crew throughout filming, much like David Peckinpah and Bill Dial ducking out on writers' meetings during their seasons of SLIDERS.

• Like Tracy Torme, Josh Trank was reported as being combative, antagonistic and abrasive towards studio executives and producers.

• Like David Peckinpah and Bill Dial, Trank was reported as being abusive towards cast members, specifically Miles Teller and Kate Mara.

• Like various Season 3 - 5 producers, Josh Trank was reported as going to set inebriated to the point of being unable to give direction.

• After the initial filming, reshoots took place, as they do on most films. However, these reshoots were reportedly done with little Trank marginally involved and producer Simon Kinberg leading production at this point.

• Josh Trank did not have final cut ]of F4.

Season 3

• Marvel Studios' head Ike Perlmutter was furious at FOX's refusal to work with Marvel on an F4 film. Marvel publishing, seeing Perlmutter's anger towards the F4 property and FOX, barred any F4 merchandise from being produced and cancelled the comic book series to avoid any enterprises that could be viewed as supporting the FOX production. (The comic had not been a high seller in years anyway and Marvel tends to publish to low profits anyway, seeing the comics as R&D for film and TV.)

• Josh Trank was reported as causing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the rented house he lived in during F4's filming.

Season 4

• During F4 filming, Trank was set to later direct a STAR WARS spin-off film.

• Disney, hearing of Trank's conduct on set, held meetings with Simon Kinberg, asking for his opinion of Trank. Following these meetings, Josh Trank was fired from STAR WARS.

• In the weeks leading up to F4's release, Trank E-mailed cast and crew congratulating them on having made a good film.

• As negative reviews of F4 were published, Trank posted on Twitter that F4 was not his film and that the studio had interefered. He quickly deleted the Tweet, but screenshots were taken.

Season 5

• F4 was a box office failure.

• FOX is now unsure of whether they will proceed with a sequel, another reboot, a crossover with X-MEN or a licensing deal with Marvel Studios.

• Trank has at this point alienated Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Simon Kinberg, Fox, Disney, Lucasfilm and his landlord.

I don't have the details. A part of me wants to see this as FOX's doing -- I mean, this is SLIDERS and X-MEN III and X-MEN ORIGINS WOLVERINE all over again -- studio interference done with no professionalism or concern for quality. Except it has to be said that this is something that happens with all big studio movies and TV shows. It happened on FRINGE with Jeff Pinkner and Joel Wyman; it happened on the X-MEN movies with Matthew Vaughn and Bryan Singer. And it happened on SLIDERS with Tracy Torme and F4 with Josh Trank.

Pinkner and Wyman and Vaughn and Singer and Whedon and Shane Black and others are people who seem to be able to work with the studio and handle all the mandates and restrictions while working hard for a good product. Trank, from these reports, got discouraged and just gave up, staggering onto set drunk because he was so unhappy with FOX and managed to lose not only F4, but the subsequent STAR WARS job he had lined up.

Nearly everyone Josh Trank worked with on F4 seems to be against him, suggesting that he was professionally dysfunctional across the board with every co-worker.

That would be so much cooler than Agents of SHIELD.

I'm a big fan of Max - he actually wrote a feature-length script about the Spider-Man villain Shocker, which is online.  He also wrote an absurdly long script for a Mario Bros movie, and I loved his take on Death of Superman (available on youtube - separate from his re-enactment of Death of Superman, which is also on youtube).  He wrote a stand-alone Superman comic where he faces off against the Joker - and it's been recreated a couple times on youtube (once as a radio-type show with Max doing the voices himself), and he's going to do another Superman comic soon (featuring a retelling of the origin I believe).

He's said that his FF script would've been fun and goofy.  That Doom would've been a good guy (at least in the first one).  He seems conflicted on releasing more than just those pages because he knows Trank (and I assume Jordan) from working on Chronicle.  He's tried to use the publicity of his script to get people to actually go see the one in theatres.  I don't think he's commented on the film itself, mostly because he probably doesn't want to bag on it.

I think ASM suffered from the fact that they didn't want to commit to anything.  It just wanted to tease and tease and tease and tease.  But even the MCU gives pay offs.  They cut a ton of Richard Parker stuff to use in the sequel.  And probably cut the reveal for a future sequel.  Which would've pushed something to a future sequel.

I still haven't seen FF, but I'm sure they got caught between fun adventure and dark/gritty.  And probably got caught up in world building and teases on its own.

Josh Trank is an awful director.

Again, I haven't seen the movie.  But every review I've read has said the same thing - the origin isn't the problem.  I've seen nothing but praise for the first portion of the movie.  The part that fails, supposedly, is the superhero part. 

One thing that I've always had issue with is Doom.  I've heard he's supposedly the biggest bad of all the bads in the primary Marvel universe, but what are his powers?  What makes him so powerful?  How come I can't think of a single big-time Marvel event (granted, I don't know a ton) where he even participates?

I've seen the 2005 movie and the sequel and his powers are electricity?  Manipulation of some kind?  Being evil?  It's like he's a male Scarlet Witch - his powers are just whatever the plot demands.  And I've heard the same sort of power ambiguity exists in the new movie.

I think Fox's best bet is to absorb them into X-Men somehow.  Or, heck, do TF's idea and do a FF show instead of an X-Men show.  Or combine the two.

I don't know if the new version can meld with mutants or not.  If not, do FF science and send them to the Marvel universe.  Let them hang out with Channing Tatum's Gambit (who I assume will be the star of the X-Men franchise when Jackman retires).  Let them fight whatever new villain they decide to use going forward.  Team them up with minor mutants.  Put Johnny in a "main" X-Men movie.  But try and get some of the good-natured X-Men mojo associated with Fantastic Four.

That's what I'd do.  I definitely wouldn't reboot again.

I too loved Chronicle! Was a little disappointed it went the old Cliche Carrie route and dropped the sense of playful wonder that was so enjoyable in the first half but still good none the less.

The new F4 just seemed redundant to me. Sure the first two had their flaws and were rather shallow but essentially they were specracle Films without too much pretension at being more so Fun but..... Yeah.

The thing that bothers me most in all F4 Films though is the Lack of Ambiguity re Doom. He was never and should never be a 2D Bad Guy.

So ireactions - and I'm genuinely asking this question - is it possible to do a Fantastic Four movie in 2015 era times?  In your opinion, is the concept possible?  Because after reading more of this, I watched some youtube reviews - and everyone is talking about giving the rights back to Marvel.  And yeah - they've done a pretty good job with the Avengers - but it's not like they're infallible.  Iron Man 2, both Thor movies, Cap 1, Iron Man 3 - these aren't great movies.  I still haven't seen Ant-Man, and Avengers 2 was underwhelming.  We don't know what they're going to do with Spider-Man.

Can we trust that Marvel will do better than Fox?  Based on Ant-Man, we know that studio interference won't be any less.

The pieces were in place in 2005 and 2015 for a good Fantastic Four movie.  Is the source material too flawed to get it right?

Well let's go back to the beginning then.  From what I've read and seen, the issues that Fox had with Trank's original idea were things that took place in the first half.  Reed and Ben were working for the government at a young age.  Victor's last name was something else before it was changed to Von Doom.  Items that the studio thought would scare off fanboys so they were changed.

And according to reviews, the first half wasn't the problem.  As far as you know, what were the changes made to the second half of the movie, where it allegedly fell flat?  Because the problems seem to be that Doom had no real motivation to want to destroy the Earth, the action was meaningless and pointless, and that you didn't care about any of the characters.

I'd love to think that Trank had a really good movie that Fox screwed up.  That's his claim, after all.  But I've just yet to see what his idea would've been that would've saved the second half of the movie.  And maybe that idea didn't leak.  But if it did, I'd be curious to know what it was.

Why don't they just set the movie in the 1960's? They did it with The X-Men and it worked as well as any of the other movies. And Captain America kept the WWII origin before throwing him forward in time.

They should just embrace the dated element and use it to their advantage. It might keep them from interacting with some other properties, but it would probably be more successful.

The 1960s idea is pretty cool to me.

Regarding FF's essentials? I guess the sense that the FF are a weird family thrown together by circumstance and they explore the unknown is all that's really essential. The ULTIMATE FF comics were a great read for me and they recast Sue and Reed as teen geniuses working for a secret government thinktank in weapons development. It was fantastic! (Actually, I seem to recall the reviews being pretty terrible, but I enjoyed them lots.)

In comics, time is fluid and floating. Captain America was frozen in the 1945s and then woke up in 1964. Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were WWII army buddies. The Black Widow first met Iron Man when she was a Communist spy. As time progresses, Cap's defrosting is referred as having happened 10 - 15 years ago, and flashbacks always reflect whatever that is relative to the present. Reed and Ben refer to meeting in the army but don't refer to the conflict. The Black Widow is still a former Communist spy and her youth is explained as potion that froze her age, but references to her first meeting with Iron Man make no reference to her original employers. There's occasionally a retcon or two with Marvel, but for the most part, readers somehow shrug and accept that Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider in 1963 but only ten years have passed for him despite it being 2015. However, the X-Men of ten years ago time travel to the modern era and are amazed at how 2015 technology is far ahead of the 1960s. Basically, it's a joke. It's not supposed to make sense.

I would say that you have to respect Ben Grimm / The Thing.  Ben is Jack Kirby (co-creator of the Fantastic Four) - the cigar chomping, gruff, bruiser with a heart of gold who's smarter and more talented than he appears to be.  Ben is the heart of the FF and a piece of the man who brought it all to life.

From what I hear, the new movie kind of marginalized Ben; but the little development he was given was to show him as someone who had an abusive childhood.  That works for Hulk; but it's not Ben.  Some unused footage seems to indicate that Trank got it right at one point; it showed Ben as a baseball player and allegedly before each game his coach would give the battle cry "It's Clobberin' Time!"  That could fit Ben.

Torch is the comic foil to the group and that should be there.  Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis really nailed the two characters in my opinion.  Reed and Sue are kind of blank archetypes really; Reed is the living exposition to what's going on, and writers have been trying to figure out what to do with Sue for a long time.  There's room to grow there, but the main aspect of the Reed character is his intelligence and inventions; without that, you have a different character.  It would be like saying we're going to take MacGyver in a new direction where he doesn't make stuff.

I do think their celebrity status is important; and even the comics have addressed how the world reacts to the reality bending experiments taking place in the Baxter Building in New York (currently the FF has been evicted and the building was brought by Peter Parker as the new HQ of his multi-million dollar company Parker Industries).

As for Doom, he didn't appear in the comics until issue 5, and I don't see him as the center of the FF world.  Doom would be off doing his own thing and not even noticing the Fantastic Four except that Reed Richards is part of it.  Doom and Reed went to college together, and Doom blames Reed for the lab explosion that disfigured his face (leading Doom to wear the iron mask).  The reality is that the explosion occurred because Doom was hasty; Reed tried to warn him the machine was going to blow up, but Doom wouldn't listen to him.  Doom started there using Reed as the scape goat for all his failures and it's just never ended; if something doesn't go Doom's way, it must be because of something Richards did.

The interesting thing in the comics is that the lab explosion actually only left a tiny scar on Doom's cheek; but Doom was so vain and OCD about his appearance that he freaked out.  Doom went to live with monks for awhile where they forged the mask for him to try to help him overcome his obsession about his face; but Doom was impatient and put the mask on while it was still heated from the forging.  That is what led to his face being horribly disfigured; it wasn't Reed at all.

However, the thing with Doom is that he's pretty much the FF's Lex Luthor.  Doom obsessively hates Reed, so he's always going to be pushing himself into the FF world just for that reason.

As for other villains in the FF universe, the biggest one is probably the Skrulls (and that's likely the key reason why Marvel Studios wants the FF license back).  The Skrulls are shape changing aliens that have been a big part of Avengers stories (including a big one called Secret Invasion); but they first appeared in Fantastic Four, so they are part of that license.  Marvel Studios also needs the FF license back to use the big Avengers villain Kang the Conqueror (who first appeared in Fantastic Four as Rama Tut).

The remaining rogues gallery of people like Puppet Master, Mole Man and the Frightful Four are better served in something like television; the only truly epic things left are Annihilus (the insect emperor of the Negative Zone dimension), Galactus and his heralds and Namor the Submariner (whose movie rights are tied up at Universal Studios).

Would that have been a movie people liked more?

Well I can't imagine I can be any clearer that I have NO idea what makes a good FF movie

Okay, is it weird that I didn't hate the Fantastic Four movie?  It was bad, but I didn't think it was terrible.  It was also pretty short, making it easier to stomach.  I think Trank is right, and it could've been pretty good if they'd just done a few things different.

What's funny is that I watched the movie in two parts because I got distracted and had to stop in the middle.  I stopped exactly at the time jump in the movie.  So I got to watch the first half before they get their powers and then the second half (which was just about 40 minutes).  And, yeah, the stuff with Doom is pretty dumb, but I think it'd be pretty simple to make a pretty good movie out of it.

It was short on action, so I would've included more of the army scenes that they alluded to (and showed clips of).  If they have to team up at the end, maybe individual action sequences to show them using their powers (instead of just testing them - maybe a foreign army tries to kidnap the Four or something).  And since this was "Fantastic Four Begins" - I would've had the government be the bad guys and save Doom for a sequel.  He seemed completely shoehorned.  Plus, I've seen 3 movies, read a few articles on him, and you guys have tried to explain, and I still have no idea what Doom's powers are supposed to be.

To me, movies are all about expectations.  I was expecting the worst superhero movie ever, and it wasn't.  So I sorta liked it.

(I know I just lost all credibility I had left )

The beginning of the movie wasn't too bad. I was wondering why it was as hated as it was. But after the time jump, it was like the ongoing story was dropped and the climax of some other movie was tacked onto the end. It quickly became a confused, sloppy jumble of a movie that had no purpose to it.

Well, I mean the problem is that there wasn't really any conflict in the movie so they just tacked on Doom in (literally) the last 20 minutes.  The first 20 minutes is just Reed and Ben.  Then they introduce Franklin and Sue.  Then Johnny.  Then they build it, go to the planet, and come back.  There's no villain in the first half of the movie except just "progress" I guess.  The planet is sorta evil and the main guy is sorta bureaucratic, but that's it. 

Then the second half really is a different movie.  Bureaucratic guy becomes "take over the world" evil, Reed runs off, Ben gets mad that he was abandoned, Johnny embraces his powers, and Sue is just helping or whatever.  Then Reed comes, fixes the machine in ten minutes, they get Doom back, he tries to destroy the world, and they team up to beat him.

So there's no villain until Doom shows up the last 10 minutes.  Doom wasn't really a bad guy before he transformed.  He never endangers the other guys (except maybe convincing them to go in the first place).  Bureaucracy guy just wants to move the project along - and even when he's using Ben (and then Johnny) as weapons, both seem pretty okay with it.  Doom is just tacked on so there's someone for them to fight.

If it was me, I'd leave the first part of the movie almost exactly the same.  I'd have Doom refuse to come back but start working on his own gateway with the Latverian government.  Reed and co finish the gateway first, go to the planet, and they get their powers by some accident.  A year passes.  Reed doesn't run off because that plot doesn't go anywhere.  The government uses Ben on some missions, but Franklin's been able to keep Johnny on the sidelines while Reed and Sue work on the gateway.  Meanwhile, Doom finds out that Reed got it to work when he sees what's happened to Ben.  So Latverian soldiers attack the facility, and the Four are able to fight off soldiers using their powers (an action piece where they work individually because it's super powers vs. normal soldiers).  In the chaos, Doom sneaks in and steals a vital piece to the gateway and gets away.  Back in Latveria, he completes his machine and goes along with a couple soldiers to Planet Zero.  Something bad happens, Doom gets left behind, one soldier dies, and the last soldier comes back horribly mutated (I don't know any other FF villains but Doom and Galactus so let's just say it's either one of their villains with a new origin or it's a new villain entirely).  The mutant starts wrecking the lab and Latveria asks for the Four's help.  So they go, struggle at first, and the defeat him as a team.  End credits scene shows Doom on Planet Zero, using his powers to create a gateway on his side.

More action, no cramming Doom into the finale, an extra action piece.  Not changing a ton.  Could've worked.

I do wonder how Trank figured on ending the film.  Because, again, there's no villain in the part of the story he seems to be affiliated with.

I would still love to know more about what happened in his opinion, but it's cool that he did that.

Trank feels he made a mistake in his handling of F4:
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/josh-t … ent-wrong/

*gapes at Temporal Flux*

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR was... unpopular... ? Ultimate Reed becoming a villain was... good?

TF is making me wonder if I am completely out of step with superhero comics now which, I admit, I don't read too often. I tend to let things pile up for a few years on Comixology and then catch up. I read everything between AVENGERS VS. X-MEN and HOUSE OF X last month.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR was a neat reimagining of the team with Reed as a gifted teenager drafted into a US Army think tank in New York City with Sue Storm as a scientist, Johnny tagging along just for the hell of it and Ben as the only friend Reed had from childhood. Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis did (I thought) a great job of updating the 60s team for the 2000s by making everyone (a) teenagers and (b) working for a US Army weapons farm and Reed and Sue accidentally turning themselves and two innocent bystanders into superweapons. Millar's action-oriented set pieces and Bendis' hilarious dialogue were (I thought) a winning combination for the first arc.

Then came Warren Ellis, who brought his brilliant hard science approach into exploring how Mr. Fantastic stretches. How the Invisible Woman manipulates the molecular structure of her body. How the Human Torch can ignite. And how Ben is basically immortal now. Ellis had several great arcs and after a fill-in with the equally clever Mike Carey, we had Mark Millar bring his crazy action lunacy back to the team as he advanced the characters from operating within a secret branch of the army to existing as independent superheroes (and brought in the Marvel Zombies). Then Mike Carey came back again with some exciting extradimensional adventures that brought the crazy Kirby adventure with the youth of the Ultimate FF.

It was very much the energy of SLIDERS with the sci-fi creativity of Douglas Adams and the humour of David Mamet -- but now that I think about it, maybe it wasn't that popular because Marvel ended up blowing it all apart with that weird ULTIMATUM crossover that massacred the X-Men and the Ultimate Avengers and blew up the Fantastic Four's headquarters and had the team break up.

I guess Marvel wouldn't have blown the team apart if the book had been selling well.

Then came that very odd ULTIMATE ENEMY series where Reed killed his parents and sister and attacked the Earth with his new alien allies and became a crazy supervillain, a bizarre turn of character that was completely at odds with the gentle, polite, merciful scientist who tried to help Doom, clearly adored his baby sister, and spared the Marvel Zombies when he could have gassed them to death and called it a day.

It was the equivalent of Quinn Mallory becoming an emotionless sociopath in Season 4 of SLIDERS and I waited for the comics to explain what the hell was going on. Instead, Ultimate Reed became even more of a psychopathic, mass murdering sociopath who renamed himself The Maker.

It was bizarre and everything there remains as incomprehensible as Quinn being unconcerned with Wade in "Mother and Child" and as baffling as Quinn being indifferent to rescuing his mother and adopted home Earth in "Revelations" and as traumatic as the Professor's horrific murder in "The Exodus" and typing all this is actually making me upset and distraught and pained and agonized and confused and Temporal Flux is right and ULTIMATE FF was a terrible experience I can't go through this again good bye.