6) Peyton Reed’s Fantastic Four
Many comic book properties have suffered the slings and arrows of a difficult development process, but perhaps none more so than Marvel’s First Family, the superhero team that kicked off the Silver Age of comics in 1961, the Fantastic Four.
An ultra-low budget version was made in 1994, and despite attempts at suppression, it made the rounds on the black market tape circuit at comic-cons ever since. But between then and the 2005 Tim Story film, there were several attempts to make a big budget FF, and one of them was to be directed by Ant-Man‘s Peyton Reed.
For his version of the Fantastic Four, Reed took inspiration from the same era that the super-team was launched in, the 60s. He saw the Fantastic Four as a super-powered Beatles and their movie as a kind of Hard Day’s Night, as the team dealt with their very public celebrity as they protected New York from giant monsters and alien invaders. Also, in a move that was unique for superhero movies both then and now, Reed’s Fantastic Four was not going to be an origin story.
Reed had a script from current Daredevil showrunner Douglas Petrie, and a cast including Alexis Denisoff (Mr. Fantastic), Charlize Theron (Invisible Woman), Paul Walker (Human Torch) and John C. Reilly (Thing). Unfortunately, the head of 20th Century Fox at the time felt that the movie Reed wanted to make was a little ambitious, and a little too meta for the average movie audience, and the result was not just one, but two, underperforming Fantastic Four film from Tim Story.
