Simon Kinberg on what he believes to be the failures of Fantastic Four

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

When a film bombs rather spectacularly, be it critically or commercially, there's a certain amount of obsession which follows as we attempt to figure just what went wrong. One of the bigger disappointments of the past few years was Josh Trank's FANTASTIC FOUR, but I probably don't need to tell you that. The potential was there for something unique to happen, which is obviously what the cast and crew were aiming for, but the film didn't quite come together. While speaking on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Simon Kinberg revealed what he thought was FANTASTIC FOUR's downfall.

I don’t think that there is, in any movie that doesn’t work, a single decision that is the reason that that movie doesn’t work. I think that there were many decisions we made along the way that led to a movie that people didn’t like and to a movie that I would do differently next time. I think the biggest takeaway for me [is that] the tone of the movie, while really interesting and ambitious, ran counter to the DNA of the source material. I think the source material of Fantastic Four is bright, optimistic, poppy in tone. There’s a sort of plucky spirit to those characters, and we made a darker, sort of body-horror kind of version of Fantastic Four, which again as I say it now sounds really interesting and cerebrally ambitious, but isn’t necessarily Fantastic Four.

It's a shame that Fox can't seem to get Fantastic Four to work even after three times at bat; perhaps one day we'll get to see a Spider-Man scenario play out which has Marvel collaborating with Fox to give us their vision of Marvel's first family, but for the time being, Fox still has plans for the future of FANTASTIC FOUR. Simon Kinberg says that the franchise is "a big part of the plan going forward. Like I say, the biggest lesson learned was that Fantastic Four is a great comic book that has its own tone and voice, and we need to honor that and let that lead us." Although there's always the temptation to start over from scratch, Kinberg says that he'd love to continue on-wards with Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell.

I'm sure Denny's is counting down the days until they can bring the Thing Burger back.