It’s a well-known fact that there’s a competent blockbuster buried deep beneath Josh Trank’s widely derided Fantastic Four reboot. We’ll likely never clock eyes on said cut, of course, but more than twelve months after the movie’s theatrical release, stories of its troubled development continue to intrigue.
The latest of which hails from screenwriter Jeremy Slater, who revealed to Screen Crush that at one point during Fantastic Four‘s production he penned “10-15 drafts over a six month period.” Yikes. Employing a throw-everything-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks strategy from early on, if there was an inkling of a compelling film at Fox, it became lost amid a wall of white noise fairly quickly.
That said, the vision that Slater describes does sound pretty interesting, imagining the Baxton Building “as a sort of Hogwarts for nerds: a school filled with young geniuses zipping around on prototype hoverboards and experimenting with anti-gravity and teleportation and artificial lifeforms.”
It’s worth keeping in mind that Slater’s comments are going to be naturally biased towards his own script, but the scribe went on to tell the outlet that his initial pitch contained “lots of humor, lots of heart, lots of spectacle.” The only problem was that it became far too expensive to wrangle that vision into a feature-length movie.
Here’s a tease of what could have been:
“In addition to Annihilus and the Negative Zone, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilized world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60-foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet,” Slater added. “We had monsters and aliens and Fantasticars and a cute spherical H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that was basically BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed. And if you think all of that sounds great… well, yeah, we did, too. The problem was, it would have also been massively, MASSIVELY expensive.”
Tell us, what do you make of this latest wrinkle to the Fantastic Four story?
