20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History
3. Fantastic Four (2015)
Director Josh Trank and star Toby Kebbell have both gone on record as saying that the original cut of last year’s Fantastic Four reboot (also known as Fant4stic) was wholly different to the weird, incoherent mess that ended up in multiplexes following studio-mandated reshoots and re-edits.
That’s lovely, and perhaps one day that cut will resurface as a curio on the bonus disc of some better movie. The cut that was released, however, is the cut that people will remember: not the select few that saw it in cinemas, but the people that read the appalling reviews, or heard the appalled word of mouth, and steered as clear as possible.
Fox’s first two attempts at the Fantastic Four in 2005 and 2007 were lightweight and forgettable, but at least they were recognisably the Fantastic Four. That’s not the case in Fant4stic - and don’t even get me started on their nemesis, Doctor Doom, who gets treated like a second string baddie rather than the Marvel Universe’s greatest and grandest villain.
The reboot does Marvel’s First Family a crushing disservice. The tone is gloomy, cynical and bleak throughout, and the revamped origin story - involving a portal to a desolate ‘Planet Zero’ dimension - completely lacking in the sense of wonder that their back story of cosmonauts and cosmic radiation created in comics readers back in 1961.
It’s fairly obvious that Trank intended ‘Planet Zero’ to be the Negative Zone of Marvel Comics’ fame. It’s possible that, had a sequel ever been made, more would have come of this: one of the unique properties of the Negative Zone in the comics, after all, is that it can act as a gateway to other parallel worlds, bridging the Multiverse, which could conceivably have pulled off the trick of having the Fantastic Four enter the world of Fox’s other Marvel franchise, the X-Men.
That’s almost certain never to happen now: plans for a Fantastic Four 2 were shelved very quickly indeed once it became clear that this was the biggest superhero movie misfire since Halle Berry’s Catwoman fiasco. That makes Fant4stic the film that killed the franchise; precisely the opposite of the way a reboot is supposed to work.