It was a story that dominated a lot of the summer last year: Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four, its troubled production and its failure at the box office. The director dismissed the movie shortly before its release and went radio silent shortly thereafter, but its producer – and one of the directors of the non-Trank reshoots – Simon Kinberg has been talking about the movie and its future.
“I don’t think that there is, in any movie that doesn’t work, a single decision that is the reason the movie doesn’t work,” he told Happy Sad Confused (via ComicBook). “I think there were many, many decisions we made along the way that led to a movie that people didn’t like and a movie that I would do differently next time. I think the biggest takeaway for me – and there were many takeaways, and this could be a whole other segment – is that the tone of the movie, while interesting, ran counter to the DNA of the source material. The source material of Fantastic Four is bright, optimistic, poppy in tone. There’s sort of a plucky spirit to those characters and we made a darker sort of body horror version of Fantastic Four, which again, even as I say it now, sounds really interesting and cerebrally ambitious…but it’s Fantastic Four. So it’s a lesson that I would learn not just for Fantastic Four but for any movie going forward is to be true to the material.”
The planned sequel for the movie was quietly removed from 20th Century Fox’s production schedule, but Kinberg claims there is still life within the Fantastic Four world Trank established. “[Fantastic Four is] a big part of the plan going forward…[I would] love to keep making movies with that cast.”
WATCH: Flickering Myth chats with Simon Kinberg about X-Men: Apocalypse, The MCU and Fantastic Four
What do you make of Kinberg’s comments? Should Fox continue making Fantastic Four movies, or should they just give the rights back to Marvel?
Be sure to check out The Fantasticast, part of the Flickering Myth Podcast Network…
Originally published June 2, 2016. Updated November 29, 2022.
