14 Simple Fixes That Would Have Made Fantastic Four Awesome

12. Cut 20 Minutes From The First Half Of The Movie...

The first half of F4 begins promisingly enough, but ends up feeling extremely excessive and bloated. It all begins with a solid prologue sequence of Reed and Ben as youngsters, before the group are slowly brought together, and after a number of padded, bloated scenes, they finally visit Planet Zero. This is where the iconic accident bestows Reed, Johnny, Sue, Ben and Victor with superpowers, by which point the movie is already halfway home. There are so many superfluous scenes which could be cut from this build-up: Johnny racing a car to depict him as a trouble-maker, the building of the Quantum Gate, testing it out on a monkey and so on, all of which could've been squeezed into a montage or pretty much cut entirely. This should all be first-act material and cut down from 50 minutes to about half an hour. As a result Trank would immediately have a much more engaging first act, setting the stage for the Fantastic Four to show off their powers and Doom to cause plenty of trouble.