Oh dear. Superhero movies have enjoyed unprecedented success in the past decade, forever changing the way Hollywood approaches blockbuster filmmaking, but the cracks are finally beginning to show. The fact that Avengers: Age of Ultron is now the sixth highest grossing movie of all-time should fly in the face of that, except that analysts and critics alike were shocked when Joss Whedon’s sequel failed to match the success of its predecessor. Marvel also had another hit on their hands this year with Ant-Man, an atypical hero who few had heard of outside of comic book fandom, but the film still performed relatively poorly in comparison with the rest of the studio’s output.
And then there’s Fantastic Four.
Anyone who holds even a passing interest in cinema is likely to have heard of how spectacularly the latest Fantastic Four movie failed at the box office this weekend. Scraping just $26 million domestically, the reboot has already become the biggest turkey of the year, confirming the worries that the majority of fans held long before the film was even released.
While the negative press was admittedly warranted, things didn’t have to turn out this way for Marvel’s First Family. Join us as we take a look at 4 reasons why the Fantastic Four reboot should have worked, and 4 reasons why it all went wrong.