Well, it’s happening again. Twentieth Century Fox’s Fantastic Four reboot is being rewritten. Popular wisdom is that the more times a script is rewritten, the less likely it is to be any good. Let’s hope that’s not the case this time, because this one has passed through a whole lot of hands so far. Writers such as Michael Green, Seth Grahame-Smith, T.S. Nowlin, and Jeremy Slater have all taken a turn working on the script, and it’s about time to just get the thing done already. There needs to be a quality Fanastic Four movie soon before the franchise loses its luster entirely.
The new writer this time around is Simon Kinberg, who’s been around the superhero block before, having written X-Men: Last Stand (not a good sign) and produced X-Men: First Class (a slightly better sign). He’s also attached as a writer and producer for the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past, so clearly Fox has some faith in his abilities if they keep bringing him back for what is unarguably their biggest superhero franchise. Hopefully their belief that he can help put Fantastic Four on the same level is not unfounded.
The Fantastic Four, while one of Marvel Comics’ oldest and most storied superhero teams, have had a pretty rough run at the cinema so far. Starting with Roger Corman’s legendarily laughable attempt at bringing them to the big screen back in the early ’90s, the space radiation-blasted superheros then were subjected to the twin indignities of the 2005 Fantastic Four film and its 2007 sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Neither did as well as 20th Century Fox would have liked, which could have to do with the fact that they were just objectively not very good.
Fox’s Fantastic Four reboot will be directed by Josh Trank, who helmed the actually-quite-good 2012 film Chronicle, which brought a unique perspective to the superhero movie genre, so perhaps the combination of Trank and Kinberg can find some success this time around. If not, it may be clobberin’ time for the both of them.