Simon Kinberg talks The Fantastic Four and its planned sequel

With filming now underway on director Josh Trank’s (Chronicle) reboot of The Fantastic Four, writer and producer Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past) has spoken to Collider about Fox’s latest take on Marvel’s First Family. As well as confirming it will be post-converted into 3D, Kinberg once again promised a “realistic” and “grounded” tone…

“The energy on set is great. Josh Trank is fantastic on set. Really in command, really clear, and the thing that is most unique or defining about the new Fantastic Four is the tone. We’re approaching it in a much more realistic, grounded, science rather than science-fiction way. The playfulness or goofiness of those other movies is very, very different from what we’re trying to do, and that is true for the production design, the casting, the storytelling. But you never know until you get on set how it’s all gonna start to feel, and just seeing those actors and seeing Josh, the way he’s articulating the tone and the way the actors are executing it gives me a lot of confidence that we’ll actually be able to make a cool Fantastic Four movie.”

Fox is of course confident that there’s franchise potential in the reboot, having already set a July 2017 release date for The Fantastic Four 2, and Kinberg also went on to discuss how this has informed the approach to the first movie:

“I think with a lot of these movies you have a sense that if it goes well you’re going to make another one.  If it’s a terrible disaster I don’t know that you ever get a shot no matter what the date is, but they have a lot of confidence in the movie and we have confidence in the movie.  And what I like about it is, as a writer you can start to think about, ‘Well what am I building toward?’… I think actually in some cases what it helps me do as a writer is it forces me to ask certain questions I may not do if I was just telling a one-off movie.  Meaning I have to ask questions of, ‘What is this gonna mean to them when they’re 30, 40, 50 years old?  Who are these characters going to become?’ because hopefully I’ll be writing them in three years, five years, seven years from now.  But those are not necessarily always questions you ask yourself when you’re telling a standalone movie, you sometimes are just like, ‘Who are they in the span of the three weeks this movie takes place?’ or ‘Who were they in the 30 years of their lives that preceded it?’ but you don’t really think past the confines of that film. I think there is an opportunity in this kind of storytelling when you can tell a bigger story, and you can actually even deepen each story by having it project across lots of episodes.”

Originally published May 9, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.