20th Century Fox is pulling out its secret weapon in advertising this summer’s Fantastic Four: a Kanye West track. The hypnotic drumbeats of the killer track play over two brief TV spots for the Josh Trank-directed superhero movie and actually work pretty effectively to help sell the troubled film as a fresher, edgier kind of comic-book movie.
Of course, because this is Fantastic Four, every time the film takes one step toward being accepted by the larger geek community, something makes it take another one back. And that appears to be the case with a new promotional poster debuted by Empire, which delivers a crushing blow to Jamie Bell’s Thing by revealing that the poor guy is missing a little more than just his pants. I don’t know whether to feel worse for him or any potential love interests down the road, but this Thing is clearly missing some…thing (ahem).
[zerg]That rather hilarious poster aside, the spots do a solid job of blending action and witty dialogue, giving us some excellent glimpses of the central four’s powers in action as well as an intimidating shot of villain Doctor Doom (Toby Kebbell). Fox has certainly performed a rather incredible about-face in the way that it has been advertising the movie – compare these lighter, cooler previews to the somber, melancholy, Christopher Nolan-aping tone of the first trailer, and Fantastic Four almost seems like an entirely different movie (which, to be clear, is a very good thing).
Fox’s new Fantastic Four includes Miles Teller as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Kate Mara as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm/the Human Torch and Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm/The Thing. There’s no escaping that Trank’s film made a pretty bad impression with fans at first, but it’s going to be very interesting to see Fox work to turn that around leading up to the pic’s August 7 release.