It’s hard to think of another film with so much potential that bombed so hard. 2015’s Fantastic Four was meant to attract a new generation of viewers by cashing in on the superhero craze brought about by The Avengers, whilst still telling an original tale.
The idea was this: the 2005 effort had nailed the aesthetics, but completely dropped the ball with regards to everything else like tone and character motivations, especially as they were depicted in Jack Kirby’s original run. Thus, the solution was to ground the story in a hard science fiction setting in order to synthesize two visions: Kirby’s space opera take, and the more modern version of the characters from the Ultimate comics.
Given everyone’s love for Interstellar the year before, it seemed like a good idea. And it was, until it actually began to take shape. Sitting with a pathetic 9% on Rotten Tomatoes and generally hated by just about everyone, the film’s better off forgotten and though he wasn’t solely responsible for it flopping, writer Jeremy Slater has now taken to Twitter to apologize to Marvel fans for letting them down.
In an unrelated Tweet reflecting on his career, the scribe wrote:
When I finally got my foot in the door, I only had three dream projects on my bucket list. One was Marvel (umm…sorry about that one, guys), one was Star Wars, and the third, of course, was Stephen King. Any one of those jobs would let me die a happy man.
To put things into context, Slater’s speaking about how happy he is that he’s been hired to adapt The Tommyknockers, which is based on a Stephen King novel. Given his horror sensibilities (he’s responsible for the criminally underrated and now cancelled TV show The Exorcist, based on the film of the same name), we’re sure he’ll knock this new project out of the park.
As for Fantastic Four, well, he didn’t exactly deliver what fans wanted. Again, it wasn’t entirely his fault that the film sucked so much, but the script wasn’t great and it’s nice to see that Slater knows that and can at least poke fun at his work and acknowledge that Marvel fans were pretty disappointed by it.
