Here's The Bonkers Fantastic Four Remake That Almost Happened

It's always nice to hear about early versions of scripts that were scrapped - particularly when the finished project is actually terrible and probably vastly inferior to what could have been. Such is the case with the latest Fantastic Four reveal, courtesy of former screenwriter Jeremy Slater, who was hired by 20th Century Fox to write the reboot initially.

He has revealed in an interview with Screen Crush that basically everything he wrote ended up being rejected outright, and in some cases it's not entirely difficult to see why.

Slater says that he would have focused more on the inner workings of the Baxter Foundation and the relationship between Reed Richards and Victor. Intriguingly the film would have also introduced Annihilus - who Slater calls a "pissed off cybernetic T-Rex" (that's not what he is, so let's be thankful he didn't get his own way) in the Negative Zone, where the team get their powers. Victor's plan would have been to kill Annihilus and steal his cosmic control rod to create himself a "sort of living body armour". Sure, I mean, that's crazy but it sounds a hell of a lot more entertaining than what we got.

Slater also offered some more of his vision:

"In addition to Annihilus and the Negative Zone, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilized world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60 foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet. We had monsters and aliens and Fantasticars and a cute spherical H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that was basically BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed. And if you think all of that sounds great...well, yeah, we did, too. The problem was, it would have also been massively, MASSIVELY expensive."

Not just massively expensive, Jeremy, massively shark jumpingy. But that's sort of what the franchise needed, actually. It didn't need to be brown and drab and boring: it needed to be comic and pulpy and mental and a little bit outrageous with a nostalgic 60s edge. Sadly, Fox didn't agree, and instead went with the version that sucked all of the fun and the life out of the Fantastic Four. And here we are.

What do you think?