Remember when Batman Begins came out and everyone was really impressed by how dark and gritty and realistic it was, in stark contrast to the primary colors and campiness of later era Batman films like Batman Forever and Batman & Robin? Yeah, that was really cool in 2005. What we might not have expected though was that every single superhero movie to come out following Nolan’s franchise would aspire to the same darkness. Even the far lighter Marvel Universe films cannot shy away from moments of serious existential angst from our heroes, and forget about DC making anything not soaked in the deepest, darkest dye. Now, we can toss away any hope of Fox’s reboot of The Fantastic Four having a nice, happy ring to it, even if it is based on a Marvel comic book.
Talking to The Daily Beast (via The Playlist), writer Simon Kinberg compared The Fantastic Four reboot to Nolan’s successful reboot of the Batman franchise. No Jessica Alba in a skin-tight suit or Chris Evans (remember that?!) throwing flames around. This is gonna be gritty:
“It’s not as goofy as the first movies; it has humor in it, but the humor is much more real and comes from character, not pratfall jokes,” he explained. “It’s a much more dramatic film than it is a comedy. I would say it falls somewhere between Raimi’s first couple of ‘Spider-Man’ movies and ‘Chronicle.'”
OK, somewhere between Spider-Man and Chronicle is a pretty big spectrum. Kinberg also compared the film to Iron Man and the first X-Men, thus managing to hit just about every major superhero franchise in one swoop. He went on to say that the film will also be a gritty “coming-of-age drama.” That’s a lot for one superhero film, isn’t it?
The point is that The Fantastic Four will move as far from the original (and truly terrible) films as it can possibly get. I think we can all be happy about that, though I hope the script that Kinberg has produced is a bit more focused than he seems to be at the moment.
The Fantastic Four will hit theatres on June 19, 2015.