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.