It's now been over a year since Josh Trank's FANTASTIC FOUR arrived in theaters and completely self destructed, but for whatever reason we just can't stop talking about the film and speculating on why it was such a mess. ScreenCrush recently examined the film to analyze just what went wrong with FANTASTIC FOUR and were able to get Jeremy Slater, one of the three credited writers on the flick, to chime in with his original plan for FANTASTIC FOUR.
Slater worked on the script for a good six months before he was replaced and by the end, only a single line of his made it into the finished movie. While the outline of Jeremy Slater's draft is fairly similar to what we ended up with, Slater was hoping to inject the film with “lots of humor, lots of heart, lots of spectacle,” while Josh Trank instead wanted to make everything as “grounded, gritty, and as realistic as possible.” Slater saw Reed Richard's time at the Baxter Foundation quite differently as well, saying that he imagined it as "a sort of Hogwarts for nerds: a school filled with young geniuses zipping around on prototype hoverboards and experimenting with anti-gravity and teleportation and artificial lifeforms.” Reed and friends still teleported into a different dimension in his script, called the Negative Zone as opposed to Planet Zero, where they battled Annihilus, who Slater refers to as a "a pissed-off cybernetic T-Rex."
Who knows whether Slater's version would have turned out any better than what we ended up with, but it's unlikely that his script would have moved forward as it was anyway since it would have sent the budget skyrocketing.
In addition to Annihilus and the Negative Zone, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilized world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60 foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet. We had monsters and aliens and Fantasticars and a cute spherical H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that was basically BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed. And if you think all of that sounds great…well, yeah, we did, too. The problem was, it would have also been massively, MASSIVELY expensive.
Miles Teller recently told us that he'd be game for more FANTASTIC FOUR, but I'd be rather surprised if we saw Marvel's first family appearing on the big-screen anytime soon. If Fox was actually able to put together an entertaining FANTASTIC FOUR film I certainly wouldn't be adverse to seeing Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell returning, but after three attempts, it might be wise to let the franchise rest for a while.