Why Can’t Hollywood Make a Good Fantastic Four Movie?

 

Hollywood’s approach to making films based on the Fantastic Four have come across with the same skill, poise, savvy, and success as a toddler with a chain saw.  Even when they go the thing really going, only disaster followed.  But why?  What about this classic comic book series has made it so hard to translate onto the big screen successfully?

For the approximately six of you reading that have no idea about the sordid film history of the Fantastic Four, it may shock you to learn that there are actually four adaptations of the comic.  The first came by way of B movie legend Roger Corman in 1994 when Constantin Films were desperately trying to hold onto the film rights to the comic book.  The film was not great to say the least, and it was never intended to be released, only serve as a place holder to show they were doing something with the film rights lest they lose them.  They later gave the rights back to Marvel and they were then sold to Fox.  Just sit on that for just a second…the first time a film was made about the Fantastic Four was for a project that was never meant to be seen by human eyes. 

This led to Fox’s adaptation of the comic book in 2005, which actually did a decent job as far as an origin story.  It hit all the right beats you need for an origin, but lingered a bit too much on the “origin” part, took too long to get to the point of the film, and featured a lack luster villain.  But the movie made enough for a sequel two years later, one that featured the Silver Surfer and a planet eating cloud.  If that sounds like it should be exciting, it’s because it should and they somehow managed to stomp the excitement out of it.

This brought on a “gritty reboot” of the franchise.  This is where the “toddler with a chainsaw” analogy really comes into play because the movie feels like said toddler hacked it apart and tried to put it back together with modeling clay.  While in the 2005-2007 films the characters seemed to like each other begrudgingly, the 2015 reboot made you wonder why they would ever be in the same room with each other.  “Fan4stic”, the title alone should have been our first clue about the disjointed mess audiences were about to endure, and an entire article alone could be made about how bad it was.  In fact, there are plenty of articles, movie review, blogs and vlogs that cover it so we’ll just leave it as “it was really really bad” and move forward.

                But why?  Why has this failed four times in a row?  It has been strongly suggested that the source material was just bad, but if the source material was really bad, why have they been a grounding force in Marvel Comics since 1961, only losing their title in 2015 due to low sales.  54 years does not indicate bad source material.  Even still the characters live on in other books.

No, the problem is that Hollywood, and specifically Fox Studios, do not know how to tell the Fantastic Four’s story.  There is no question that Pixar/Disney’s Incredibles is an excellent Fantastic Four film, I said it when I first saw the movie, and people are still saying it today.  That’s because The Incredibles remembered something that Fox forgot, that the characters ultimately need to love each other.  Even when they are getting on each other’s nerves, they need to love each other.  There is a reason they are called the “First Family of Comics”, because they are a family that cares for and looks out for each other.  Secondly, the movies spend to long trying to tell you where the Fantastic Four come from and not enough time telling you what they do.  These characters challenge the unknown by means of cerebral sci-fi high adventure.  Think “Dr. Who” meets “The Incredibles”.  That’s the kind of story that needs to be told to get the comics to fully come alive on the big screen.  Not the tangled mess that is bogged down in power swapping, Jessica Alba’s underwear, or scowling at the camera.  This is a comic book series that features shape shifting aliens, a tyrannical dictator who uses magic mixed with science, a giant purple man that eats planets, interdimensional travel,…even Moleman could be made into an interesting film.  The problem with the source material isn’t a lack of information, there is actually too much to squeeze into a single film.

Movies feel the need to over emphasis a character’s back story.  You get it every time you hear “With great power comes great responsibility…”, “I’m alone in the universe…”, “It’s my fault, it’s my responsibility…” or “Martha!”  With that obsessive need to tell us where the character came from, it cuts out time to tell the story itself.  What could be told in a brief flashback or a side conversation ends up taking the first thirty to forty minutes of the film, and another 15 minutes in the sequel.  The story of the Fantastic Four is not about four people getting hit with cosmic radiation and getting powers from it.  It’s about a family with superpowers going on adventures and making a difference in the world.

So, from the outside looking in, how do we fix this?  How can we get the Fantastic Four back on track?  Step 1: Give the rights back to Marvel Studios.  You’ve had your chance Fox, you broke your toys, go play with the X-Men.  Step 2: Stop trying to make movies about them.  Trying to squeeze a Fantastic Four adventure into a 90 minute movie is like trying to fit 30 pounds of anything into a 20 pound bag, or me trying to fit into my pants from high school again.  At best, it’s going to be awkward and uncomfortable, at worst a button is going to fly off and kill someone.  Step 3: Make a TV series.  Recently we saw Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist grace Netflix and at least three of those shows were pretty damn good.  That shows Marvel knows how to make a TV show.  Agents of Shield is still going strong, and the Inhumans, Defenders, and the Punisher are on the horizon ready to make an impact.  Fantastic Four would be an excellent addition to this small screen sub universe of the Marvel Cinematic juggernaut, by bridging the more family friendly fare of the movies with some of the darker elements the television shows offer up.  Further, it doesn’t matter if the stories intersect with the overarching cinematic universe because they can just hop into another dimension and piddle around there.  Or use them to fill in blanks in the movies.

The ultimate problem with all of this, however, lies in the company’s belief in the property.  The Fantastic Four will return…someday, and when they do we can pray that someone competent is running that ship.

Season 1 Round Up: Preacher

     

On the heels of the, apparently, very popular television series “Lucifer” comes the hard hitting small screen adaption of a very adult oriented comic book about a tough but spiritually lost country preacher Jessie Custer.  Now I’m not particularly inclined to the “binge watching” epidemic that is apparently sweeping across our planet, but this series’ first season I did check out in, what we shall call “rapid succession”.  Does that mean I liked it?  Well, yes and no.

While “Preacher” is based on the comic book series by Garth Ennis, with art by Steve Dillon I can at best say that it is loosely based on the source material.  It pulls from the material the basic characters, such as Jessie, Tulip, Cassidy, and Arseface, but sets out to tell its own story of manhandled redemption.  Probably the most important aspect of any series is getting characters that you can connect with, relate to in your own way.  Everyone going into this series is probably going to have their favorite characters, but that doesn’t mean that these characters are “good people”.  In fact, a big part of the series is peeling back layers and finding out that characters you thought were one way end up being very different from preconceived notions.

For instance, lets briefly examine Emily Woodrow, a single mother of three children, who is a waitress, the church organist and church book keeper and basically Jessie’s keel, keeping him in line (mostly) with his pastoral duties.  On the surface she is apparently the best person in a town full of pretty nasty people.  Then you find out that she’s stringing along the town’s milquetoast mayor so that he’ll baby sit for her and satisfy her sexual needs while making sure he understands that they are, at best “friends with benefits”.  Then she sends him to his death by mauling from a vampire.  Bear in mind, said mayor isn’t a great person, but still, for the second highest ranking person in the local church, this seems kind of harsh.

Flip to the other side of the coin with one Odin Quincannon who is without a doubt one of the worst possible specimen of humanity to date.  He is the highest ranking person in the town, and he rules the roost with childish fury.  He is a straight up psychopathic lunatic with no redeeming qualities.  Except, as the season unfolds you discover that his entire family was killed in a freak accident while vacationing in Europe.  His…entire…family.  The final shot we have of him in the season is of him cradling a mock-up of his daughter he made out of meat.  This man is broken on a deep psychological level and if you imagine losing your past and your future in one quick moment, you can kind of understand why this guy came unspooled. 

A large portion of this season deals with this kind of dynamic, where people you thought weren’t that bad end up being kind of horrible, and the horrible people end up not being as bad as you thought.  The series tries, sometimes clumsily, to balance the character dynamic within itself, but again, that may be the point of the writers, that within people in general, this balance is clumsy at best.

Dominic Cooper headlines the series as Jessie Custer, the wayward titular preacher who has been given the power of “Genesis”, an ability to inflict his will on others with his voice.  I was pleased to see how Dominic handled this because this could easily be something the studio placed on the effects department alone, but Cooper embellishes the moments where Jessie uses his power with posturing and facial expressions that sell that he’s letting something else take over.  When he really sells it is when it seems like Jessie is abusing the power, but his expressions leave the viewer to wonder if Jessie is using Genesis, or if Genesis is using Jessie.

Jessie is clearly the hub of the series.  Everything revolves around him, but if Jessie is the hub, then the forces that hold it together are Joseph Gilgun as Cassidy, Ruth Negga as Tulip, and Ian Colletti as Eugene.  The character of Tulip in the first two thirds of the series starts to really grate on the viewer, at least for me, and she just comes across as a stubborn irritant.  This is later paid off on by explaining her sordid backstory with Jessie and how they came to be at odds.  I don’t necessarily feel this excuses her behavior, but it certainly informs it.

Eugene, which fans of the comics will know as “Arseface” due to an unfortunate encounter with a shotgun, is actually the nicest guy in town, and offers the most candid understanding of the faults of others.  This is due to him being the town’s outcast, treated as a monster for something he supposedly did (check out season 2 for details).  Eugene is too good for this town and it’s simple as that.  While the town of Annville has turned normal people into monsters, this monstrous looking young man proves to be the one good thing there.  Which, I have a theory, is why the people of this little slice of purgatory really don’t like him.  He’s better than they are.  He is a more decent person than they are, and that bothers them.

Then you have my, hands down, favorite character Cassidy, the hard drinking, hedonistic, drug abusing, self-deprecating vampire.  Again this is a monstrous character that partakes of horrible things but ends up being one of the most decent people in the whole town.  He admits that he’s not the best person, that he’s done terrible things, and unlike a lot of the other characters who straddle this good/bad line (cough-tulip-cough) he actually regrets some of the bad things he’s done.  Even as a blood guzzling creature of rage and murder, he’s not that bad of a guy.  And that’s not saying “Well compared to this guy or that lady, he’s not THAT bad.”  He helps out Jessie in a bar fight without being asked to step in, he protects Jessie when he’s incapacitated, and he’s constantly trying to get Jessie to be the better man. Cassidy is a good guy who does bad things.

When you strip away all the supernatural elements from the story of Preacher, you really are left with an analysis of the choices of complex people and the elements that fashion their decisions.  Everyone ultimately needs something.  Cassidy needs people to understand and accept him.  Eugene needs people to forgive him, but for it to be on their own terms.  Tulip needs closure so she can begin healing.  Jessie needs direction a purpose in his life.  That, my friends, is a congregation of real people.

So did I like it?  Well, I liked elements of it.  If you are looking to it for an insight into the minds or the actions, or spiritually of church going members of society, you will find it very pessimistic, and as a cradle Christian and self-described prodigal son, that kind of hurts my feelings.  Not so much that it’s wrong, because while sometimes way over the top, it’s not 100% wrong, but it’s pessimistic.  Everything is portrayed in such a way that you wonder if its ever going to be set right, so gritty and grimy that it obscures any chance of hope.  A major part of the problem is the town’s preacher, as he’s actually really bad at his job for the first half of the season.  If you want to get a glimpse of a small town church, do not look here.  This is what a church looks like when it has no leader.  A flock with no shepherd, no one to guide it or protect it, will drive itself into hell while singing hymns.  Obviously I liked some of the characters, but will those characters be strong enough or well-rounded enough to get me to come back, to spend my limited personal time to watch the show again?

We’ll see.  Thanks for reading.

Wonder Woman: Is this a New Era?

So over this past weekend I took my wife to see “Wonder Woman”.  In theatres!  I know that shouldn’t sound as exciting as it does, but when you have a fixed income and 4 lovely children, you tend to Netflix or Red Box a lot of your movie viewing.  Which, if you noticed, is why a LOT of my movie reviews happen after the films have left theatres and sat on the shelf for a bit; well there’s that and the fact that it gives me a little more freedom to talk about endings.

So what about “Wonder Woman”?  First let me take you back in time to 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”.  Without diving too much into that film we can all agree that movie had its flaws.  One thing that was almost unanimously agreed upon as done very well was the introduction of Wonder Woman.  Her role was small but pivotal and her action sequences got audiences almost out of their seats.  With that in mind, that powerful response fueling the development of the character, it would seem that a solo adventure for the Amazon princess would be a no-brainer for Warner Brothers.

But Diana Prince’s journey to the big screen is nothing if not a difficult one.  For the longest time “authorities” on box office touted that a movie based on a female superhero lead would not make money.  The problem was that, they weren’t exactly wrong.

Here is a brief chart of the most notable superhero films with female leads since 1984.  Why did I start at 1984, you ask; because that’s the first instance of a major studio producing a female superhero movie  It all starts with Supergirl  The graph below shows in blue the budget for the films, in millions of dollars, and the red shows the box off returns of those films, again in millions of dollars.  The odds were not in Wonder Woman’s favor.

Now with all this against her, how did we get Wonder Woman onto the big screen?  To answer that we need to first look at another major comic book movie studio: Marvel.  With the advent of the Avengers, and Black Widow’s major role in the film, fans started clamoring for her to get her own solo adventure, much like literally everyone else on the Avengers.  Notice that I only selected 6 movies for my graph?  That’s because those movies are pulled from the pages of established comic book studios, which have a fan base the film studios could appeal to and work up from.  And most of them tanked.  The only one to pull up any money was Elektra and it was savaged by the critics, which torpedoed it from ever getting a sequel.  So where were the fans?  Studios believed that, based on these numbers fans were not going to come out to see these movies.  So what changed?

Again, it all starts with Supergirl.  In 2015 CBS and Warner Brothers brought the girl of steel to life on the small screen.  This was a testing ground for how popular a production centered on a female superhero could be, and it worked.  Through careful crafting of a quality product, Supergirl soared through the ratings.  For its second season it moved to the CW where it joined their television superhero universe and branched out into stronger, darker stories.  Suddenly studios had numbers in droves about how fans wanted to see superhero productions featuring strong female leads.  That combined with the strong positive response Wonder Woman got from “Batman v Superman” and suddenly the studios had something they could bank on.  Now it’s fair to say that the seeds of Wonder Woman were planted all the way back in “Batman v Superman” which is great but you know that they needed those Supergirl numbers to pull the trigger on it.

In the summer of 2017 Wonder Woman rocketed onto the big screen and, as you can see the fans responded.  With a budget of $149 million Wonder Woman dominated the summer block buster scene, raking in $435.2 MILLION after being in theatres for only two weeks.  $103 million of that came on its opening weekend alone.  The second weekend (when I got to see it) it dominated the box office easily brushing aside Tom Cruise’s “The Mummy” for top spot.  To put that in perspective, not only did a superhero movie featuring a female lead earn the triple digits for millions on its opening weekend, it took out Tom “Summer Block Buster” Cruise on its second weekend in theatres. 

But I know what you’re thinking; “Michael, talk about the damn movie already!”  Okay, no.

Gal Gadot was amazing in the film.  She was powerful, she was vulnerable, she was funny, and she was deadly as hell.  She was Wonder Woman.  Chris Pine as Steven Trevor was great.  His timing was on point, and his chemistry with Gadot was excellent.  The supporting cast was terrific, and I would love an opportunity to see them together again.  Saïd Taghmaoui to me was a particularly excellent addition.

There is an implied sex scene in the film, and the final fight left a lot of questions for how the action went down in “Batman v Superman”, but the final product was fantastic.  Not only did it give us a broader picture of this amazing character, it also helped fill in some blanks for why she does certain things in Dawn of Justice.  Like “Why was she so willing to work with Bruce Wayne at the end?” and “When she looks at Lois mourning Superman’s death, why does she look to the sky?”

I am actively not telling you about the plot because I think you should go see this for yourself.  It is worth it.

 

Thanks for reading.