10 Things Marvel Wants You To Forget About The Thing
7. Roger Corman's Failed Film
New Horizons
Roger Corman's failed Fantastic Four film is the stuff of legend, with its design for the Thing taking a special level of notoriety for its horrific inflections.
While Kirby's original design for Ben Grimm was always meant to harken back to classic horror movie monsters, the Thing from Corman's project is a whole different beast altogether. Portrayed by Michael Bailey Smith prior to his transformation, stuntman Carl Ciarfalio played Grimm after his cosmic transformation, donning a rubber suit that couldn't hold a candle to the puppetry of the early Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films, which released concurrently at the time.
No one emerged for the better from the project, with the film having been made in a last ditch attempt to retain the onscreen rights for the characters and not for commercial release, making it one of the more infamous episodes in the development of the comic book genre on film. Avi Arad even purchased the rights to the project and ordered all prints be destroyed, fearing that its release would've damaged the Marvel brand at the time.
You can still watch the whole thing though, if you're in the mood for a B-movie Four flick. Just don't expect a proper release any time soon.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
