Earlier today 20th Century Fox released the first trailer for Josh Trank’s reboot of The Fantastic Four (which you can view here), and this afternoon both Trank and writer Simon Kinberg have been speaking exclusively to Empire about the trailer’s debut.
“We live in a time where there’s a required instant gratification from audiences,” says Trank to the magazine. “That’s a fun challenge in terms of putting together this teaser, picking and choosing how much you’re actually giving away.”
Kinberg continued: “What we’re doing is quite different, and we want people to get a sense of it. There is a mystery, and the slow immersion into that is part of the experience of what will ultimately be the movie. We wanted it to feel different and represent what’s unique about the film. It has a little more restraint, maybe, than some other trailers these days.”
“We want some of that to be a surprise,” Kinberg continued. “It is in many ways an origin story, but it’s also about how they react to this transformation, and the ways the world does or doesn’t react to them, which is different, I would say, than all other superhero films.”
While the interview gives us a nice tease into the new, rebooted world of the Fab Four, there was still no word from the filmmakers on whether the rumours that the superheroes won’t be wearing their signature costumes in the new film, nor that their comic-book “nicknames” will be binned in the new version.
What the duo did shed some light on was how the team gain their superpowers. “Well, I can say this – our characters go to another dimension,” confirms Kinberg. “It was something we discussed from our earliest conversations.” This deviation from the original films is seen in the trailer, where it looks like the foursome travel through dimensions to gain their powers, rather than through the space-based rays of the first film.
You can read the interview in full over at Empire, where the duo discuss more about the film’s production and the reshoots that took place at the end of last year, as well as discussing the rumoured troubled production of the film.
Meanwhile, courtesy of Yahoo, here’s Trank and Kinberg providing commentary on the trailer…
The Fantastic Four is set for release on August 7th with Josh Trank directing a cast that includes Miles Teller (Whiplash) as Mr. Fantastic, Kate Mara (American Horror Story) as the Invisible Woman, Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station) as the Human Torch, Jamie Bell (Nymphomaniac) as The Thing, Toby Kebbell (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) as Doctor Doom, Reg E. Cathey (The Wire) as Dr. Storm, and Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk) as Harvey Elder.