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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.

David Opie Aug 16, 2015 10:22 pm2017-08-18T15:21:45-05:00

3) Uneven Tone

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The reshoots dictated by Fox made the Fantastic Four feel like a disjointed mess of a movie at times, but it seems that the blame should be shared between both the studio and Trank himself, whose vision of the film just wasn’t up to scratch.

It makes perfect sense to modernize the Fantastic Four in order to compete with Marvel and DC’s releases, but the end result was just too gloomy. Rather than veer completely away from Story’s cheesy take on the franchise, Trank needed to inject some realism into the team’s dynamics while still retaining the fun of the original source material.

Early on in the films production, Trank discussed exploring the team’s newly acquired powers from a different angle, showcasing the horror of what happens when our bodies change in a way beyond our control. Unfortunately, only glimpses of this David Cronenberg style body horror made its way into a final edit that languishes at a snail’s pace for the first hour before rushing headlong into the anti-climactic ending.

Science fiction? Horror? Superhero blockbuster? Unfortunately, neither Fox or Trank could combine these disparate elements into the cohesive whole that the Fantastic Four so sorely needed to be.

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