Prior to the release of Blade in 1998, the mid-to-late ’90s was the not-so-mighty Marvel era. Despite generating hundreds of iconic comic book heroes and villains for decades, the company had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as the speculator boom in comics - peaking in 1993 with nearly a billion dollars in sales - was waning. There had not been a major theatrical movie ripped from the pages of the Marvel Universe since George Lucas' infamous Howard the Duck in 1986, followed by direct-to-video losers like 1989's The Punisher and 1990's Captain America.
It seemed like the company had hit rock bottom in 1994 when a Roger Corman-produced movie based on the Fantastic Four had been permanently shelved, yet this actually marked a new beginning that would eventually lead to an actual, big-budget, theatrically-released FF movie in 2005.
Come with us as we explore the long and winding road that eventually got Marvel’s First Family onscreen, including a look at the script for the film that Harry Potter director Chris Columbus wanted to make.
The Corman Four
Since the early ’80s, German film producer Bernd Eichinger of Neue Constantin Film (The Neverending Story) had been pursuing the movie rights to the Fantastic Four, Marvel's Silver Age flagship created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The team consisting of Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing had been integral in establishing the more semi-grounded tone of what became the Marvel Universe (Spider-Man, the Avengers, etc.), and was also the subject of several animated series. Eichinger saw the potential of a big screen iteration, finally purchasing the screen rights for around $250,000 in 1986 with the assistance of Lee, who had made it his mission to bring Marvel's characters to movie theaters. Lee moved from New York (Marvel HQ) to Los Angeles in 1978 when TV shows like The Incredible Hulk began building momentum for Marvel heroes on the small screen… but the creator had little luck getting movie versions of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and others beyond development hell.
Even though there was interest from Warner Bros. and Columbia, Fantastic Four faced the same trouble getting off the ground in Hollywood due to high expense as well as low capability of VFX to realize them onscreen. The estimated initial budget in the early ’90s was in the $45 million arena, which would have made FF one of the most expensive films ever… not to mention the extreme likelihood of shooting past that number. When Eichinger's rights to the team were set to expire on December 31, 1992, if he did not have a film in production, he acquired the services of B-movie king Roger Corman to quickly dash out a $1 million to $2 million ashcan version of a Fantastic Four flick directed by Oley Sassone (Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight). Both cast and director were in the dark about the scheme, and began promoting the film in the press. They were set to hold a gala premiere at Minnesota's Mall of America to benefit the Children's Miracle Network in January 1994, but just before that Eichinger, Marvel owner Avi Arad, and producer Ralph Winter (the Star Trek franchise) shelled out $1 million to Corman to acquire the negative and shelve the film.
According to a March 1994 report in The Los Angeles Times, Corman stated that Eichinger was "always planning to do a $40 million picture but couldn't complete the financing before his option ran out… I was glad for the money, but I'm disappointed that I won't get to release it." He also confirmed that 20th Century Fox and director Chris Columbus (who apparently expressed interest shortly after Home Alone) were already attached to the planned big-budget version, although both those parties denied being interested, possibly to separate themselves from a sleazy rights scheme which cheated a children's charity out of a premiere benefit.
Enter Chris Columbus, who officially confirmed his FF involvement the next year.
"Chris Columbus is going to write it and direct it," Stan Lee blabbed to The Arizona Republic in February 1995. "He's the guy who did Mrs. Doubtfire."
Columbus Sets Sail
A protégé of both Steven Spielberg and John Hughes, Columbus initially planned on becoming a comic book artist for Marvel. Having visited the set of his 2009 comedy I Love You Beth Cooper, this author can confirm that Columbus still draws most of his own storyboards for his movies.
"Comics are originally what I wanted to do with my life," Columbus told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1997. "I dreamed of going to New York and drawing Spider-Man. But when I realized I'd sit in a room for 12 hours a day and not talk, I decided to become a writer."
His attention shifted to film school at NYU before eventually selling his script for Gremlins to Steven Spielberg in 1981. He also wrote The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes for Spielberg before making his directorial debut with 1987's Adventures in Babysitting. That teen comedy featured an 8-year-old named Sara who is obsessed with Marvel's Thor, *sort of* depicted by future Kingpin actor Vincent D'Onofrio. Columbus hit paydirt in 1990 with the box office smash Home Alone, a Christmas comedy classic penned and produced by John Hughes that grossed over $475 million worldwide. He followed this with the inevitable Home Alone 2 as well as the Robin Williams megahit Mrs. Doubtfire, along with two smaller romantic comedies (Only the Lonely and Nine Months) before finally dipping his toe back into comic book waters.
'Comics are originally what I wanted to do with my life.' -Chris ColumbusIn his spare time Columbus was a huge fanboy, haunting comic book shops in his San Francisco neighborhood and amassing a collection of around 2000 issues (mostly vintage Marvel) including Conan the Barbarian #1 and most of the early run of Amazing Spider-Man.
"When it comes to comics, you're either a DC guy or a Marvel guy, and the Marvel comics were very inspirational to me," Columbus told the Edmonton Journal in 1996. "The Marvel characters were the real characters as far as I was concerned. They always had the real problems, they were the characters with the hang-ups."
Although he harbored ambitions to make a movie about Marvel's famed web slinger (stating "Spider-Man would make a wonderful movie"), James Cameron had already been developing the property at the time. Instead, Columbus set his sights on Marvel's First Family, admitting it would not have been financially or technically feasible before mid-’90s VFX innovations, which included the squash-and-stretch of The Mask or the Silver Surfer-like T-1000 in Terminator 2. Columbus planned to max out those capabilities with his movie, telling The San Francisco Examiner, "For example, if the elastic Reed Richards and invisible woman Sue Storm get into a fight. Sue is likely to disappear, while Reed tries to woo her back by showing her he can turn into any shape of man he wants, tall or short, fat or slim."
His production company, 1492 Pictures, joined forces with Eichinger's Constantin Film to mount the ambitious Fantastic Four project. To pen the movie, these production companies along with their studio partner 20th Century Fox (where Columbus directed his previous five films) hired screenwriter Michael France of Goldeneye and Cliffhanger fame. Up until now two early drafts by the late France (who died in 2013) have been widely available on the internet, one from May 3, 1996, (160 pages) and another from a few months later on September 9 (136 pages). We were able to get our hands on a draft from December 6, 1996, that is a truncated (113 page) rewrite of France by Columbus himself. It gives us a glimpse into his vision, which retains many similarities to the film ultimately released in 2005 that was credited to France and Twin Peaks' Mark Frost.
The Dec. 6, 1996 Fantastic Four Script
Unlike the 2005 Fantastic Four, which opens with Reed and Ben soliciting funding for their space project from billionaire tech tycoon Victor Von Doom, Columbus' rewrite begins at 55-minutes to launch of the brilliant Reed's FF-4 Phoenix Space Plane. Reed and Sue (also the mission's financier) are already engaged, while he and Ben (described as a cigar-chomping Gulf War vet) have a lot of macho tension between them instead of being instigated by Victor. The 2005 scene of Johnny (a former Blue Angels pilot) arriving late with the intro of him on a motorcycle kissing a woman in another vehicle is on the page here. Funnily, when Sue asks the media-friendly Johnny why he broke quarantine, he replies, "I had a date" - Chris Evans' final line in the first Captain America film.
During a very Thunderbirds-esque scene of the Space Plane launching out of a mountain tunnel, Johnny uses his signature catchphrase "flame on!" to initiate a second-stage rocket boost, which Ben roasts him for. Their ship arrives at the massive Orion International Space Station, described pretty much as it appeared in 2005 with "pods and passages built around a central core." Onboard they find 35-year-old Victor Obtrech, a brilliant Russian scientist who was Reed's roommate at NYU (a nod to Columbus' alma mater). Victor "NOT Von Doom" has been stationed onboard Orion alone for 275 days, during which his wife and children were brutally murdered in Chechnya, turning him cold and self-serving in his grief.
The purpose of their mission is revealed in the form of the Nanochamber, an eight-foot tall room like the one in the Baxter Building in 2005 (the one that looks like Seth Brundle's pods in The Fly). Its purpose is to rearrange atom-sized molecules utilizing nanotechnology, which Reed and Victor demonstrate by turning a rotten piece of wood into gold inside said chamber. When Ben inquires why this couldn't have been done on Earth, Reed mentions the very slight possibility of their atomic alterations creating "self-replicating micromachines" (presumably not the tiny toy cars). Victor gets pissed when he learns Sue did not bring the animal test subjects he wanted to experiment on, which she feared could result in "mutant manifestation."
The fuming Russian returns to his private quarters, where he sneakily uses his computer console to overload the Nanochamber. Trying to avoid an explosion, Ben volunteers to repair it, foreshadowing with the quip, "My ass is turnin' to stone just sittin' around this place." During the repair, a laser mesh penetrates every inch of Ben's body, and then when the chamber's entrance explodes, the mesh penetrates the other three's skin as well. The blast sends the station hurtling towards low orbit (i.e. crashing), and although Reed tries to find Victor, he can't. A burned/charred Victor watches as the Phoenix ship with the four onboard leaves the self-obliterating station behind, screaming "Noooooooo!!!" He crawls inside the Nanochamber as pieces of metal debris meld with his body, turning him into a "hybrid of skin and steel." Even his voice sounds electronic as he informs mission control, "I shall be your doom."
Meanwhile, the Phoenix crashes in a wooded upstate New York mountain area. Reed, Sue, and Johnny make their way out of the craft, with the latter's hand melting an imprint in the hull (the first sign of things to come). We then cut to a scene almost identical to the 2005 movie where Ben wakes up in quarantine and Johnny does a psych-out pretending Ben has turned horribly ugly, only to reveal his normal face. The only difference is in this script Johnny does the punch line with an 8x10 of Ben, where the movie (more effectively) uses a mirror. Next up, Johnny goes from quarantine to jumping out of a helicopter to ski with a girlfriend named Frankie (in the movie it's Maria Menounos credited as "Sexy Nurse"), exactly like 2005 right down to a line about the loser having to pay for room service and Johnny discovering his flame powers.
Reed and Sue discover their powers during a romantic interlude at a secluded cabin, but the tone is more haunting than 2005's jokier version, with Sue's invisible frame revealed by a rolling fog. Reed is blown back by her force field, crashing into a railing and folding into a tangle of limbs. Over at Ben's Brooklyn brownstone he's about to propose to his girlfriend Carlene when a tactical squad arrives telling him he has to come back in due to an anomaly in his blood cells. Ben then begins to painfully transform into his rocky Thing form as Carlene runs away in horror. He is finally brought down by six tranquilizer darts after crumpling a lightpole with his newfound strength.
We cut to an aircraft testing center where Sue narrates about their mutations and their augmented flight suits (also exposed to the energy). Reed is run through a taffy-puller-type machine, Sue lifts a tank with her fields, and Johnny amplifies the flames of a jet engine. Reed concludes there is no danger of infection, so they can rejoin society, but Ben is still upset at his appearance, blaming Reed.
This is where the script takes a very different turn from the finished film by introducing a new antagonist: Marius Morlak ("Maris" in the comics), leader of Enclave. On New Years Eve, this mad former scientist (along with his machine gun-packing goons) manages to sneak an explosive disguised in a canister onto an under-construction NYC skyscraper, and threatens to incinerate six blocks of Manhattan if he does not get $100 million worth of diamonds in two hours. Machler, the government guy holding the FF under strict quarantine, thinks Morlak is bluffing, but Reed thinks it’s a legit threat.
MORLAK: "Start spreading the news, we're dying today. I want to blow apart… New York, New York."
Locked inside an underground cage, the team argues about whether or not to escape and try to save the city, with Reed and Sue convincing the other two to help. Ben knocks their titanium cell door down, then Reed rejiggers his face to look like Machler. They manage to make it to a hangar, where they board a Reed-designed experimental segmented vehicle (i.e. the Fantasti-Car, eventually seen as-described in the sequel to the 2005 film, 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer). The FBI give Morlak a suitcase full of diamonds, which the villain examines with a loupe and realizes are fake. "Their loss," he says.
The FF swoop in as the Fantasti-Car splits into four separate units in different directions. Reed's lands, and when an Enclave goon fires at him, the bullets bounce off and back at the goon, killing him. Ben's crashes because his fingers smash the controls, but he emerges. Morlak tells one of his helicopter pilots to "Take care of that… thing." The copter fires, but the bullets also bounce off of Ben, who grabs a 30-foot crane arm and does the Babe Ruth "pointing to right field" stance before knocking the helicopter out of the sky, causing it to explode into a fireball. Need we mention he says "It's clobberin' time" before doing this?
Morlak gets in his second copter to escape, so Reed begins trying to deactivate the bomb… but realizes it's a decoy. The real one is in the Times Square Happy New Year ball, rigged to drop in 30 seconds, right where Sue is. Reed tells her to get the heck out of there, but she is able to contain the explosion with her force field, struggling to maintain it as the bubble of fire ascends into the sky (shades of the Captain America: Civil War opening with Wanda). Reed asks her to send it horizontally to him, then asks Ben if he can use his rubbery body as a slingshot.
Meanwhile, Johnny flames on and flies after Morlak's helicopter, melting a hole in its windshield. Morlak grabs a machine gun and fires at Johnny through the hole, turning the chase into a dogfight. The villain uses a grenade to explode a rooftop water tower, which douses/extinguishes Johnny, who lays vulnerable on the rooftop as Morlak leans out to finish him off. Suddenly, the force field bubble crashes into the helicopter and incinerates Morlak. Reed then stretches his arms across Times Square to catch a fainted Sue, kissing her, before the Fantastic Four look down on the crowd to cheers.
A New York Post headline reads: FANTASTIC FOUR HALT MIDTOWN MELTDOWN
While all this might sound very climactic (right after this, Johnny creates the flaming "4" in the sky just like the end of FF 2005), this is only the halfway point of the script. It gives you a good idea of the humor, fidelity to the comics, and the slightly more edgy/violent approach Columbus and France's script took, as well as the differences/similarities to the 2005 film.
The script had humor, fidelity to the comics, and a slightly more edgy/violent approach.It's safe to say the script only gets wilder/more expensive-sounding from here. In the interest of space, here's a bullet-point rundown of highlights from the second half…
- Then NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani helps the team celebrate the opening of their new headquarters, Four Freedoms Plaza (not the Baxter Building).
- Victor/Doctor Doom has now taken over Latveria in a coup using high-tech flying Doombots with advanced weaponry. He's threatening all surrounding European nations. A reporter asks Reed if the FF would intercede in such an international dispute (shades of the new Superman), but Reed says he will defer to the President.
- Reed also mentions the upcoming date when he and Sue will get married. This leads to a fight with the two of them about how many times they've already put it off, reminiscent of the start of Rise of the Silver Surfer. To cut the tension, he morphs himself into a taller, square-jawed version of himself for her, a scene Columbus mentioned in the press (see earlier in this piece) and which did make it to the 2005 film.
- Ben (in his trademark trench coat) and Johnny (in Armani) walk by a store selling bootleg FF toys and other merch, which pisses the latter off. The 2005 movie nods to this with Johnny holding a prototype Thing toy. There was also a similar deleted scene in Tim Burton's Batman Returns of a store full of Bat Merch. Johnny runs off to tape a David Letterman interview while a mob of reporters hound Ben down an alley, where he ducks into an art studio and meets the blind sculptor Alicia.
- Johnny goes over monetary figures for a Super Bowl appearance, a commercial, and hosting SNL when he sees Ben has crushed his Porsche into a cube for making fun of his appearance on Letterman. The two almost come to blows but Sue stops them. This scene is transposed from FF headquarters to the sports arena in 2005.
- Doom and his Doombots arrive at FF HQ. Reed realizes it's Victor, who gives an insincere gesture to join forces. The FF refuse, and then Ben attacks him but they realize this is a Doom robot. It explodes.
- The real Doom flies a massive space ship to the United Nations Building, where he disintegrates the Secretary General and then states his case for the entire world to live under one sovereign ruler… UNDER DOOM. He pledges to eliminate war, hunger, and to augment humanity's bodies so they never die. He asks the world leaders to think it over, and destroys the building as it "no longer has any purpose."
- The FF arrive too late to save the UN, and are then lambasted in the press. Johnny loses his HBO special, his Wheaties box, and his Nike deal. Both he and Ben decide they've had it with the team and walk.
- There’s an extraordinarily unfortunate scene with Johnny drinking at the World Trade Center's Windows on the World restaurant, where some drunken businessmen begin making fun of the hero, saying, "He'll probably burn the whole place down!" Yikes.
- The four reunite in the Fantasti-Car to take on Doom. Ben's line to Reed was transposed to a different scene in 2005 almost verbatim: "Good thing you're flexible enough to watch your own back, Richards. 'Cause I won't be." They fly past the Statue of Liberty, now remade in Doom's image.
- Our heroes arrive in Latveria, where Doom's nanotech gas takes over their flying vehicle as the team passes out. Doom traps Reed in a chair with many mechanical arms instead of freezing him like in 2005. The villain explains his plan to use nanotech to create a "hypercane," a giant hurricane shaped like a man (absorbing things through its mouth Galactus-like, while also resembling the man-like dust storms in The Mummy) that will destroy New York and any other place that defies him… leaving 4 billion people dead.
- Johnny and Sue pilot an amphi-plane to escape Doom's hydrobase, and then fly directly into the active hypercane. Meanwhile, Doom gives Ben the choice to revert to his human form in the Nanochamber, almost beat-for-beat from 2005. Doom then puts Reed in a machine that will separate his body into 100 tube-like strands similar to the way Reed is killed in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Ultimately, Ben returns to the Nanochamber, turning back into The Thing so he can save Reed.
- Ben fights Doom's Adaptoid, which can mimic whatever molecular structure it contacts (also similar to the future Sentinels in X-Men: Days of Future Past). Ben defeats it by making it mimic water, then throwing a support beam into it. He then tricks Doom into entering the Nanochamber, where Ben traps him and transforms Victor into a being made of glass… which shatters.
- Meanwhile, Reed convinces Johnny to go super nova, just like the end of the 2005 movie, but this time to stop the hypercane. Johnny outmaneuvers thermal bombs and then flies at such speed that he turns white hot like a solar flare, destroying Doom's airship, the Fantasti-Car, and knocking Johnny unconscious. The hypercane collapses on itself.
- The script ends exactly where Rise of the Silver Surfer begins, with Reed and Sue getting married on a rooftop with helicopter paparazzi observing. Johnny blasts the bouquet away from his girlfriend Frankie (see the end of Rise of the Silver Surfer) towards Ben's girlfriend Alicia. Reed and Sue ride off together in a "JUST MARRIED" Fantasti-Car, with the joke-y final titlecard: COMING SUMMER 2000 – "FANTASTIC FIVE: THE NEW BABY".
Falling Into the Negative Zone
During early pre-production, Columbus began seeking a real-life actor couple to play Reed and Sue, with Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid eventually attached to the picture. Several respected thespians (Alan Rickman and Geoffrey Rush) were eyed for Doctor Doom. Artist Tim Flattery, who had designed Arnold Schwarzenegger's superhero Turboman for the Columbus-produced Jingle All the Way, created several FF concept illustrations (dated 1997), including one with updated chrome-lined outfits for the team as well as Doom with more advanced metallic facial features. Flattery later designed the Fantasti-Car for 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and would work on many MCU projects.
In March 1996, Avi Arad and Fox seemed to be getting ahead of themselves, announcing the development of a Silver Surfer spin-off movie parallel to FF. Meanwhile, what was originally planned as a modest $6 million to $9 million vampire hunter movie for New Line under director Ernest Dickerson turned into the $50 million event film Blade when Wesley Snipes signed on. A few big directors reportedly flirted with making it, including David Fincher and Sam Raimi, before Stephen Norrington came aboard.
The year 1997 proved a huge turning point in superhero movies with the failures of Spawn, Steel, and most resoundingly, Warner Bros' all-timer disaster Batman & Robin.The year 1997 proved a huge turning point in superhero movies with the failures of Spawn, Steel, and most resoundingly, Warner Bros' all-timer disaster Batman & Robin. It was rumored that there were over 20 comic book-based properties in development at Fox alone, including an Iron Man movie with Nicolas Cage. Knight Ridder reported an ambitious slate of Marvel flicks percolating all over Hollywood that year, including Silver Surfer (directed by Geoffrey Wright), X-Men, and a (according to Avi Arad) "action-adventure comedy" take on Fantastic Four with Columbus still attached to direct at Fox. Philip Morton (Fire Down Below) had by now contributed to the script. Columbus was also pulling double duty penning Fox's Daredevil, to be directed by Carlo Carlei (Flight of the Innocent, Fluke) and heavily inspired by writer Roger McKenzie's run on the comics in the late ’70s. Elsewhere at Universal, Gale Anne Hurd was producing a Hulk movie, Paramount developed Captain America, Columbia hired David Goyer to pen Doctor Strange, DreamWorks Animation worked on Mort the Dead Teenager, and director Philip Kaufman planned an environmentalist take on the Sub-Mariner.
By early 1998, word was that Columbus' Fantastic Four had been benched despite coming very close to production. Batman's Sam Hamm was hired to add more humor and help bring the costs down on what was rumored to be a Titanic-sized $200 million-plus budget, but by then Columbus had ultimately decided to bow out of the director's chair despite putting years into the film. The director stated publicly that there was worry the movie he envisioned could cost $280 million, and now that we have read his script, one can see why. He would remain as a credited executive producer, with Peter Segal (Tommy Boy) becoming the first of a rotating roster of helmers to attempt it.
1998 was also when Snipes' Blade became the first successful Marvel Comics feature film, taking in $131 million globally. In the midst of all this, Avi Arad brought a terrible TV movie into the world titled Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., starring David Hasselhoff as Fury and penned by Blade writer David S. Goyer. One step forward, two steps back. Despite all the development heat, several other big Marvel projects were stalled, with Bryan Singer's X-Men given a blinking greenlight by studio head Tom Rothman pending rewrites to bring costs down. Spider-Man's myriad rights issues had 20th Century Fox's legal department scrambling so Cameron could direct his finished script, even as Sony pursued the rights for Roland Emmerich to make the film. Universal pulled the plug on the Hulk movie once the budget swelled to $100 million and they had to can director Jonathan Hensleigh due to inexperience. Those three high-profile films would eventually get made in 2000, 2002, and 2003, respectively, kicking off the modern superhero era we are now immured in.
The year 2000 saw a new FF director with some Columbus "DNA" in the form of 41-year-old Raja Gosnell, the editor of many Columbus films as well as the director of Fox's Home Alone 3 and Big Mama's House. Gosnell was photographed in the LA Times next to a massive concept maquette of The Thing. Fox president Tom Rothman wanted to fast-track the FF project after the success of the X-Men film, with a budget to match ($75 million). Gosnell was working closely with Columbus alongside his co-producer Michael Barnathan and screenwriter Sam Hamm to get Fantastic Four off the ground and in front of cameras before the end of the year. The comedic helmer had lobbied hard for the job, convincing skeptical Fox execs he could deliver "a big action comedy thrill ride like Men in Black," sparking backlash from fans upset at the word "comedy." However, Warner Bros. was simultaneously courting Gosnell to direct the live-action Scooby Doo, and by October he had jumped ship.
With Columbus now entirely focused on making the first two Harry Potter films back-to-back, in 2001 Peyton Reed (Bring It On) was brought onboard Fantastic Four to direct. Like Columbus and all the other filmmakers who were attached to this version of the film, Reed had a flair for comedy. Yet his initial vision of setting the story during the 1960s space race when the comic book was conceived did not meet studio enthusiasm… even though that's exactly what Marvel Studios is doing with it in this year's The Fantastic Four: First Steps (albeit an alternate timeline ’60s).
Reed then pivoted to a contemporary approach inspired by A Hard Day's Night where the Fantastic Four are the biggest celebrities of the day, and a camera in the Baxter Building captured reality-TV style candid footage of the team ordering pizza and arguing about who has the best costume. Although Reed's Fantastic Four never hit screens, he did hire writer Mark Frost, whose work was retained to final screen credit. Reed would later pour some of his ideas for FF into Marvel Studios' three Ant-Man movies, which he directed (Quantum Realm substituting for Negative Zone, etc).
After the success of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man in 2002, writer Michael France told the Tampa Bay Times that he hoped another Marvel superhero movie he had written - Ang Lee's The Hulk - would ride its coattails into production, which it did. He was also writing The Punisher movie, which Hensleigh made in 2004. France upheld that if executives "spend the money to make it good and, most importantly, stick to the characters - have fun with it, but don't make fun of it - then there's a huge audience for that."
Five years after he delivered his last Fantastic Four draft to Fox, France reasoned that the film had not been made yet because "it's unbelievably expensive. It's probably one of the most expensive comic book movies you can make with special effects shots to portray the characters… Spider-Man is only Spider-Man for about 30 percent of the movie. With Fantastic Four, The Thing is in effect in every shot. Even outside of action sequences, the comedy always revolves around The Thing and the Torch fighting at home, so even the comic relief scenes are, like, a million dollars per minute… The Hulk is not a cheap movie to make, but all they've got to deal with is one character and a villain. With Fantastic Four you've got the four of them plus a villain. In my script the villain was Doctor Doom, so there's a lot of expense in that too."
In the end, the version of the FF script that got the movie greenlit was an uncredited polish by Simon Kinberg (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), who toned down the celebrity aspect of Frost's draft while honing in on the idea of "an origin story of superheroes who didn't accept themselves as superheroes until the final sequence of the film." Once Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) was onboard to direct, he did go back to the many previous iterations for inspiration, telling the LA Times, "I read quite a few of them. You try and take the greatest hits. We would just take the older scripts and try to find the best of and see if there was anything we wanted to keep."
The Fantastic Four (Finally)!
When the second feature iteration of Fantastic Four finally reached screens in 2005 under the direction of Story, their solution to the Thing problem France discussed was to simply build an elaborate suit for performer Michael Chiklis instead of employing CGI the way the eventual 2015 and 2025 FF movies did. The result was satisfactory, though not much more streamlined from the version worn by Carl Ciarfalio in the Roger Corman production. Or, as 2005 Fantastic Four's executive producer Kevin Feige spun to Knight Ridder, "If it was really three people and a ball on a stick, we thought we'd be missing out on a lot of the fun. We really wanted the actors to be able to play off each other."
In the end, the version of the FF script that got the movie greenlit was an uncredited polish by Simon Kinberg, with Barbershop's Tim Story directing.Fantastic Four was a hit in mid-2005, earning $333 million globally (on par with that summer's Batman Begins' $356 million), yet critics pilloried it with 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. Online fans were also very dismissive of Story's two FF movies, to the point that a planned third film (possibly featuring Djimon Hounsou as Black Panther) was scuttled by Fox despite adequate returns from the first two. Although the 2005 version at times feels cheap or generic, it is not a betrayal of the material at all, staying faithful to the delightful and earnestly familial nature of Lee/Kirby's original creation while bringing it into the 21st century. Placed next to more questionable Marvel movies of this era like 2003's Daredevil or Hulk, Story's film has a kind of noble integrity.
"I grew up on comic books," Story told the Baltimore Sun in 2005. "I definitely knew the world of Fantastic Four and thought if it was going to happen as a movie, I would go after it 100 percent."
One problem is the effects read like they are (quite literally) stretching the boundaries of the movie's ample $100 million budget, even as the story itself more-or-less isolates the characters within the Baxter Building for a good chunk of the runtime. Fantastic Four also feels a little at odds with its own light tone, with Chris Evans' Johnny Storm living his Maxim lifestyle, or the chamber Reed Richards constructs to rid he and his fellow four of their freakish powers resembling something from Cronenberg's The Fly. Even when it threatens to tread into existential body horror, the movie does not stray far from being (relatively) kid-friendly.
This indecisiveness has been highlighted by some of the film's actors. During an interview with ScreenRant's Grant Hermanns shortly before his death this past July, Doctor Doom actor Julian McMahon said the following of the two FF films he made with Story: "When we did the movies years ago, we were at the precipice of all that stuff happening. So, we were finding our way a lot, and we were trying to figure out what space the movie itself lived in. Was it a kid's movie? Was it a family movie? Was it more comedy-driven, or was it more trauma-driven? We were trying to find all that stuff as we were shooting."
Feige also hinted at this tonal tension when discussing the perceived battle between his summer movie and Batman Begins to The Gazette in 2005: "Batman, as it should be, is going to be very dark. Fantastic Four will have its share of drama, but it's also going to have a level of humor and fun that I think will make it stand out."
One bit of little-discussed off-screen drama? Chris Columbus was given the boot from the 2005 Fantastic Four (and its sequel) in pre-production, despite being credited on both films. He had no involvement at all with the final film, even though his initial creative direction came through in the final product.
"We were fired off of Fantastic Four," Columbus told Wilson Morales in 2015. "We had a meeting with the director and the producer. I’m a pretty gentle guy. I don’t go in as an 800-pound elephant and say, 'You got to this, and this, and this.' We wanted to see the conceptual art. We walked in, my partner and I, Michael Barnathan, and we said, 'Oh, this looks good,' nothing but compliments really. I may have asked a question about whether we were going to do a Ben Grimm CGI. I said, 'You really never get the size of Ben Grimm if he’s not CGI or something.' We left. About an hour later we got a call from the studio, and they said, 'We don’t think you guys should be creatively involved anymore. We’d like to take you off the movie.' I said, 'You don’t want us to produce?' and they said, 'No. We’ve got a producer. You guys will just be executive producers.' That was the end of that. That was the end of Fantastic Four for us."
At its heart, the Fantastic Four has always been about a loving dysfunctional family, something the new film from Feige and Marvel Studios appears to be adhering to. Through years of persistence and the initial juice of Chris Columbus' involvement, Bernd Eichinger was able to bring the group properly to the screen despite contractual, financial, and personnel setbacks. A nascent slate of films based on Marvel characters was still in the awkward stage, and FF was similarly grasping to strike the right tone while trying to capture what was already indelible on the four-color page. It took an army of at least 12 creatives to generate a workable script from logistically challenging material.
The seams certainly show in how the movie barely – but ultimately does – function… kinda like a family.
Top image credit: Marvel Comics and Caroline Schiff/Getty Images
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