6. Don't Retell The Origin Unless You've Got Something New and Important To Say
As I've said before, one of the reasons that Batman Begins is such a great movie is that it's the first cinematic telling of Bruce Wayne's origin in real time. Another thing that made his back story so compelling was that it was significantly different from the one in Tim Burton's movie. There's two words in that last sentence that you should pay attention to: significantly different. If Fox and Trank decide to retell the origin of Reed Richards and his pals, they need to make sure that it's a different enough origin to be worth telling. There's definitely room to improve on the origin from the first movie that was done in 2005, but it's not a vitally necessary element of a good FF reboot. Punisher and Hulk have shown that you can leave the origin to the side and still have a movie that stands on its own legs. If someone had seen either movie not being at all aware of the first ones, they would still hold up. The Incredible Hulk had an opening credits sequence that showed the new origin and a couple lines of dialogue. That was it. Warzone was even more sparse, it only had dialogue to tell the movie savy viewer that it wasn't the same version of Frank as the previous film. The reason neither film bothered to retell the origin of their protagonists is because the film-makers knew that the core audience was already familiar with the characters. That same principle of familiarity applies to The Fantastic Four. Anyone that's likely to be seriously interested in paying first run ticket prices to go see a new FF flick, is already the type of person who knows how they got their powers. A quick scene or a few lines of dialog should be enough to get the details out of the way so that the show can get on the road. Speaking of the show being on the road, for this tour there's one cat who should not be allowed on the bus...