While 20th Century Fox has enjoyed a fairly solid run with its X-Men franchise (in terms of box office receipts at least), the studio suffered a major setback in 2015 with its Fantastic Four reboot – a film that was butchered with reshoots, trashed by fans and critics alike (and even its director Josh Trank), and grossed a miserly $168 million worldwide.
Fox did have high hopes for the film – its second attempt at bringing Marvel’s First Family to the big screen – and even had a sequel pencilled in for June of this year. Naturally that hasn’t materialised, despite never having been officially being ruled out by anyone involved with the project, and the status of the franchise remains up in the air.
Should Fox opt against another Fantastic Four movie, the rights will eventually revert back to Marvel Studios – something that would no doubt delight fans of the MCU – and Collider has asked Simon Kinberg whether he expects the studio to release another FF movie in order to prevent that from happening.
“I have no idea,” said Kinberg. “I think the truth is we would not make another Fantastic Four movie until it was ready to be made. One of the lessons we learned on that movie is that we want to make sure we get it 100% right, because we will not get another chance with the fans.”
It’s little secret that Josh Trank’s original vision for the movie was pulled apart by Fox, with the film undergoing extensive reshoots; star Toby Kebbel, who played Doctor Doom, claimed that Trank’s original cut was “great”, but it looks like we’ll never know whether it would have been an improvement as Kinberg did not sound too optimistic when asked about a potential Director’s Cut release:
“I don’t know the answer to that in terms of whether or not fans will ever see it. I think B-roll is probably the place where they will see it. And for us, it’s in the past in the sense of lessons learned and we would love to make another Fantastic Four movie. We really believe in that cast, and I think the lessons that we learned would help us make a more consistent movie than we did the first time.”
Would you like to see another Fantastic Four movie with Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell? Is it even possible for Fox to make a more consistent Fantastic Four movie? Or is it time they give up and let the rights revert back to Marvel?
Probably a silly question…
Originally published February 24, 2017. Updated April 15, 2018.
