Home Featured Content

4 Reasons Why Fantastic Four Should Have Worked (And 4 Reasons It Didn’t)

Oh dear. Superhero movies have enjoyed unprecedented success in the past decade, forever changing the way Hollywood approaches blockbuster filmmaking, but the cracks are finally beginning to show. The fact that Avengers: Age of Ultron is now the sixth highest grossing movie of all-time should fly in the face of that, except that analysts and critics alike were shocked when Joss Whedon's sequel failed to match the success of its predecessor. Marvel also had another hit on their hands this year with Ant-Man, an atypical hero who few had heard of outside of comic book fandom, but the film still performed relatively poorly in comparison with the rest of the studio's output.

4) Exciting New Interpretation

Recommended Videos

Fantastic Four

Tim Story’s adaptation of the Fantastic Four made a lot of money back in 2005, but it was also cheesy as hell. The Fantastic Four have always been a fun property in the comics, following the exploits of super-powered adventurers exploring new worlds, but it’s as if Story had learnt nothing from the camp antics of Batman in the late 1990’s.

Hollywood seems intent on making everything darker these days, but in the case of the new Fantastic Four reboot, this actually made sense. It was vital that Fox steered their new movie away from the cheesefest that still lingered in audiences minds from before. Furthermore, the idea of making a superhero movie explicitly grounded in the science fiction genre would have set their reboot apart from the esteemed competition.

Why reboot a property if you’re just going to retread old ground anyway, right? Devising a new origin story based on the more modern Ultimate Fantastic Four comic would have been a stroke of genius if handled right and it sure as hell made more sense than ‘cosmic rays.’

So why did the Fantastic Four reboot fail?…

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9