Fantastic Four try again for franchise footing
Comic hasn’t yet hit with movie fans
LOS ANGELES — The “first family of Marvel” has had some growing pains.
While Marvel’s X-Men and the Avengers have built their big-screen empires into welloiled billion-dollar franchises, the Fantastic Four have faltered with never-was and the never-should-have-been adaptations. First there was the Roger Corman-produced film that was killed before it hit theatres in 1994, and then two critically panned but decently profitable attempts in 2005 and 2007 with future Captain America Chris Evans as the Human Torch.
The Fantastic Four are among Marvel’s longestrunning comic series and most-beloved groups. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the scientists-turned-superheroes were relatable and wry in their interactions as a team — even when they weren’t fighting supervillains. When the series debuted in November 1961, it was a refreshing revelation that helped inform the Marvel voice and set a path for Iron Man and Spider-Man.
The family aspect is derived from the brother and sister pairing of Johnny and Sue Storm, the bond between the four after they get powers and the fact that Sue and Reed Richards eventually become Marvel’s most stable couple. But the movies have yet to get them right, or devise a structure to introduce them to fans and potential fans.
So, much like Sony’s two Spider-Man reboots, Fox is trying again to resurrect the first family with a cast of fresh faces in Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell, and a promising but essentially untested director at the helm in Josh Trank. Trank’s breakout, the found-footage sci-fi thriller Chronicle, was the kind of sleeper hit that can make a novice filmmaker’s name in Hollywood. Produced for a mere $12 million US by Fox, Chronicle ended up making $126 million worldwide in 2012.
It would also be the unintentional tryout that made Trank a no-brainer to revive the thematically similar Fantastic Four. Fox set Simon Kinberg, who’d already succeeded in helping craft the worlds of X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, to produce and co-write the origin story.
Trank cast his Chronicle star Jordan as Johnny Storm/ Human Torch, who suggested his That Awkward Moment co-star Miles Teller for the part of the genius scientist Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic. Mara and Bell came aboard too as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman and Ben Grimm/The Thing and they were off, each knowing that success could mean a multi-film, multi-year commitment.
Bell said Trank promised his cast a “small, human approach” to the largerthanstory about a these humans who get superpowers after a violent accident. Mara said she latched on to the proposed tone and his ambitions to make a “completely different and a modern take on the comics.”
Teller, who has been transitioning between the indie and studio world with roles in Whiplash and the Divergent films, was intrigued by the opportunity to be part of something this size. He’d also been impressed with Chronicle.
“(Trank) talked about the body horror of it and how these kids were going to have to deal with this trauma before they could harness it. Before they could combat evil Dr. Doom, they were going to have to transition to that place. I was interested in the transition of it,” said Teller.
Late- game reshoots caused some speculation that the film had problems. But, reshoots are fairly standard for big films. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation and Mad Max: Fury Road are just two examples from this year of films that required them and ended up working for critics and audiences in the end. It was mostly a headache getting the cast — all of whom were off shooting other films — back into the same room.