10 Sci-Fi Movie Ideas Too Good To Fail (That Did It Anyway)
7. Fantastic Four - A Gruesomely Realistic Take On The Source Material (or Not)
By now much of entertainment world has understandably
turned its back on Max Landis, the controversial screenwriting guru, WWE
fanatic, and son of Animal House helmer John who co-created 2010’s inventive
found footage superhero flick Chronicle with director Josh Trank. Landis has
been outed as monstrous figure over the last few years, but Trank was the first
of the pair to become persona non grata in Tinseltown due to his bizarre behaviour
when helming this 2015 reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise.
Initially the premise was simple and pretty genius—in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s more serious Dark Knight superhero trilogy, the studio hoped to reboot the campy Fantastic Four films of the early 2000s by turning them into a darker, moodier affair, one which tackled the trauma and implicit body horror of the eponymous quartet’s transformations.
It was a daring and original direction—and one which
the studio soon flinched away from, but not soon enough to salvage the flick.
As a result, the film audiences received in 2015 was a mess, a cut cobbled
together from Trank’s uncompromisingly bleak vision and the studio’s more conventionally
upbeat reshoots, and the franchise fell apart before it could begin as a
result.