‘Fantastic Four’ writer says the disastrous reboot wasn’t his fault

Jeremy Slater has been open in admitting that 2015’s Fantastic Four reboot was awful, and it’s not as if anyone is in a position to argue with him. After all, not only did he write the thing, but a 9 percent Rotten Tomatoes score makes it the single worst-reviewed Marvel movie in history.

Of course, Slater is back in the good graces of comic book fans everywhere after serving as the lead writer on Moon Knight, while the titular team are in the midst of being rebooted yet again, even if the director’s chair remains vacant following the departure of Jon Watts.

While he still won’t deny that the critical and commercial disaster failed on every level, Slater did at least try to claim in an interview with ComicBook that it wasn’t all his fault.

“I don’t think the original Fantastic Four was my fault per se, because I have one line of dialogue in that movie when Reed is about to do his science experiment as a kid, and he’s like, ‘Don’t blow up,’ I think that’s the one line that held over from my script and everything else was changed.

So I don’t take a lot of ownership over it, but I also know the optics of if they announce, ‘Hey, we’re doing a Fantastic Four movie,’ All of Twitter goes ‘Yay,’ and they’re like, ‘And the guy that wrote the last one’s doing it again,’ and all of Twitter goes, ‘You idiots!'”

It sounds as though the extensive reshoots and behind the scenes problems severely impacted his contributions, then, which we suppose does technically absolve Slater of some blame. Fingers crossed that the MCU will finally get Marvel’s First Family right at the fifth time of asking.