The 2015 Fantastic Four film was terrible. That’s not an opinion, but a largely accepted fact. While making many ambitious changes (casting Johnny Storm as an African American, and making the team much younger than their comic book counterparts) seemed like it could work in their favor, the film went on to bomb, garnering a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and resulting in a $60 million loss for the studio.
Simon Kinberg, writer and producer of the Fantastic Four, who is doing his rounds to promote X-Men: Apocalypse, which he also wrote and produced, stopped by the Happy Sad Confused podcast to talk about new film as well as past projects. During his talk he discusses regrets with both Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand, the former of which he largely maintains loving the cast but not the tone of the film.
“I don’t think that there is, in any movie that doesn’t work, a single decision that is the reason that that movie doesn’t work. I think that there were many decisions we made along the way that led to a movie that people didn’t like and to a movie that I would do differently next time. I think the biggest takeaway for me [is that] the tone of the movie, while really interesting and ambitious, ran counter to the DNA of the source material. I think the source material of Fantastic Four is bright, optimistic, poppy in tone. There’s a sort of plucky spirit to those characters, and we made a darker, sort of body-horror kind of version of Fantastic Four, which again as I say it now sounds really interesting and cerebrally ambitious, but isn’t necessarily Fantastic Four.” (transcribed by Comics Alliance)
That’s not to say he’s done with the franchise. Kinberg went on to say the Fantastic Four are “a big part of the plan going forward” for Fox studio, and that he’d love to keep the cast of the first film. This may prove to be difficult now that Michael B. Jordan has signed on to have a role in another Marvel Comic’s property, the upcoming Black Panther film. This wouldn’t be the first time a former Fanastic Four-er went on to another project, as Chris Evans who played Johnny Storm in 2005’s Fantastic Four and its 2007 sequel has since moved on to play Captain America in both his own film franchise and the Avengers films.
We’ll see what happens.
