After months of playing coy, Fox's marketing teams have finally decided it's clobbering time. There are now two officially sanctioned images of The Thing doing the rounds, one released to Empire and the other to Entertainment Weekly, and both of them right here, right now, for your consideration. He's not as orange as fans might be used to, and his big, cartoony brow has gone, but I get it. I can see the pathos in this design. It's also interesting how little he looks like Jamie Bell. Now the images are out there, the next testing point will come when we hear Bell's voice coming out of this thing, or see it animated with, presumably, some input from his performance capture. Josh Trank and Simon Kinberg have obviously made a lot of changes to The Fantastic Four in the process of putting together this adaptation, of which The Thing represents just a proportion. So far, though, I can follow their thought processes and everything - no pun intended - looks pretty good to me. With these images coming out now I wouldn't be surprised to see another trailer very soon, and certainly in time to play with Age of Ultron, wouldn't you think? The Fantastic Four is currently set for release across the UK and US on August 7th.
Brendon Connelly has been a film writer since the early 90s, with time on the staff of Orbit Magazine, Slashfilm, Bleeding Cool, Den of Geek and many more. He's a long time teacher of film studies and practical filmmaking classes, and has directed music videos, commercials, short films and more. His favourite film is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, his favourite food is pancakes or crepes, and he tries to live his life by the teachings of Kermit the Frog.
