f13.net

Official trailer for the new Fantastic Four movie. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_flR9_6msik)

OK, so they took a Marvel property and made a Zack Snyder Grimdark version.

(http://i62.tinypic.com/34pkpar.jpg)

I'll wait for netflix.

Ahaha.  That looks fucking woeful.

Not enough in there for me to say one way or the other. They went for way too much teaser and not enough meat.

They're nicking the Ultimate Storyline and Origin by the looks of it, the casting is fucking awful and The Thing look godawful in that one shot you see of him.

No, I'm pretty much ok with casting stones this early.  Bad.

It certain looks horrible.  The bad thing about it being horrible is that they're tying it to the X-verse.  More 'Deadpool without a mouth' badness that they'll have to wipe out with time travel...

Crossing FF and X-men together makes no sense.  They're like oil and water.  FF works so much better partnered with the Avengers, Spider-man or Hulk.  Fox really should just hand these characters over to another studio for a share of the profits...

That won't happen. Fox let the Daredevil rights go back to Marvel because they didn't have any movie plans in the works. Fantastic Four has more play than Daredevil in mainstream movies, despite what you might think of the movies. Plus, they are apparently in discussions to make an X-Men TV series (there are rights complications with TV properties based on ABC airing Marvel stuff).

X-men always did well on TV, I'd be happy to see a return.

Was the FF4 ever really popular? I recall them being somewhat popular a long time ago when I was under 6 but that could be me. It seems comics and culture moved on and they don't quite work as a team these days. I'm not sure how you'd make them work, really. They need someone who understands them and understands modern culture to reboot them properly.

This movie sure doesn't look like that. It looks like another grab to keep a possible profit center in Fox's hands until they, maybe, at some point in the future, figure out how to actually do a superhero movie.

Probably right about the time the market for them goes poof.

X-men on TV is entirely in Marvel's control.  If they say no, then it won't happen.  Fox has to give to get... and Marvel is going to want something.  I could speculate forever about possibilities... but right now, I think the statement by Fox is likely more about putting pressure on Marvel to allow them to make it than anything else.  As such, I think there is a pretty decent chance we do not see them on the small screen anytime soon.  And if we do - can they do the true X-men justice on a TV budget yet?

FF - on screen - has never been done right.  Fox has botched it twice now (or so it seems, at least).  However, I have a pretty clear vision of how the MCU could use those characters and how they'd fit in naturally.  However, I just can't see a way to mesh them with X-men that makes any sense or capitalizes on anything that has come before...

Go onnnnnn....

Yech. I liked the previous movies just fine... well, not so much the second one, which I lost interest in about 15 mins in. And I didn't particularly care for their James Woods-esque Doctor Doom. But the tone of it was just right.

I felt nothing from that trailer. 

Yes, at one time FF was a thing.  A big thing for Marvel.  You had the classic 60's, 70's and John Byrne's defining run in the 80's which to me was the high water mark of the comic.  My personal favorite was when Byrne had Gladiator (Superman) fight the FF. 

Unfortunately, they put out an animated FF show without Johnny Storm; they were afraid kids would set themselves on fire copying him.  He was replaced with a robot named Herbie.  Needless to say the show sucked.

But I agree with Merusk, pop culture has passed FF by.  The powers, stretching, invisibility, fire and being rocky seem trite to me now.  Maybe a good writer could change my mind and maybe this has a good script, but I'm not going to see it in the theaters.

I didn't instantly hate it quite as much as I thought I would, but I'm not loving it either.

Chronicle was pretty dark as well. There have been a number of rumors of production problems during the filming of this though that mostly seemed to center around Josh Trank being some kind of psycho, but who knows how true any of that is. I still think there's a good chance this could be a decent movie, if not necessarily a good Fantastic Four movie. I don't really care much about the FF as characters anyway so it doesn't matter too much to me.

I love the characters, but maybe they're due for some reinvention. The basic core thing with the FF, it seems to me, is:

One part explorers/adventurers (rather than standard crime-fighting superheroes)
One part dysfunctional but loving family
One part cosmic/global/superscience/weirdness, e.g., these are not guys who operate in mundane settings even though their lives as weird adventurers have this totally normal domesticity hidden inside of it all

And then each of them has a few really core things:

Reed Richards has to be basically the Professor from Gilligan's Island--a bit otherworldly, a bit absent-minded professor, a bit crazy, but also surprisingly good in a fight if need be
The Thing has to be salt of the earth, an ordinary Joe, but also quick to anger and melancholy
The Human Torch needs to be impulsive, young, a bit stupid, a bit vain
The Invisible Woman needs to be in love with Reed but also surprisingly powerful and basically capable of being the real emotional heart and spirit of the family--mother, sister, wife, most trusted confidante

If you're going to do Doctor Doom, he has to be Reed's intellectual rival, and incredibly vainglorious and arrogant but also distressingly competent when need be--like Lex Luthor, someone you can almost imagine being a hero rather than a villain if it weren't for some crucial character flaws

Everything else is negotiable or can be shifted.

Rex Reed has had some grey hair forever. Making this about college age kids is a mistake. Also, how hard is it to find a real blonde in Hollywood for Sue?  I like Kate Mara but not for this.

Fox seems determined to have terrible casting in all their attempts at doing Fantastic Four.  Chiklis and Evans were the only two that worked from the first movie.

I think the most damning indictment of this thing is that no one seems to feel positive about it. At most, the reaction is like mine - I don't hate it, but I don't feel much from it.

Mark Waid did some good FF comics a few years ago, right before the Civil War came in and totally fucked the character of Reed Richards pretty much forever. Since then, no writer has done a version of the group that hasn't in some way been really terrible or really weird. Hickman's run was too much sugar for a dime and the Council of 1000 Reeds, JMS did a run that didn't really have any lasting impact but did reset Doctor Doom back to boring status after Waid's run, Mark Millar followed his shitty Civil War by trying to patch the Richards' marriage back together despite the fact Reed had become a goddamn mad scientist creating homicidal Thor Clones and Matt Fraction spent 16 issues with the FF off of Earth dying because their powers were killing them only to end it with yet another cross-reality teamup with other universes' versions of the FF against Doom the Conqueror.

So yeah, it's all been really weak tea.

Not a huge Fantastic Four fan and that trailer really didn't make me want to go see it.

The FF are from another time and should probably stay there. Their story has been told, resolved, retold and resolved again a half dozen times. They suffer from being the originators of a bunch of tropes, so their original schtick of not having secret identities and being a family aren't compelling in comparison to everything else around.

Their powers are fine, but their characterization is not complex nor interesting and has been done to death already. The FF work best as like, a supportive backdrop in a universe. Probably the most important bits about the FF franchise are their rogues gallery. That opens up all that weird cosmic stuff and Doom.

I completely disagree that they're done or boring as characters. Shit, by that standard every single superhero ever and every character from serial genre fictions is done and boring. A dysfunctional family having weird adventures? A scientist who always has to feel a bit guilty that he not only did an uncontrolled experiment with his friends but ended up making three of them even better off but one of them a monster? A kid who acts like an overconfident dick but gets away with it all and an older man who is the responsible guy who somehow ends up fucked over all the time because of it? (In the origin, Ben tells Reed he's being an idiot, and more often than not he remains the voice of prudence right up to the point that he loses his shit and decides to tear someone a new asshole.) A woman who is determined and charismatic but who secretly worries she's not worthy of her genius husband (Reed and Sue often have echoes of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe), and who often has to keep the family together when no one else will bother?

How is any of that done, over, boring? Sure, there are storytelling cycles with the FF that they go through, but hello! Batman, Superman, the Flash, the Avengers, Thor, Spider-Man, Sherlock Holmes, the Doctor, the guys from Supernatural, Mulder and Scully, Captain Kirk and many others would like to have a word with you. The fundamentals with FF are really strong. The powers are the least interesting part of it. One of the best versions of the FF was The Incredibles, which had a lot of the same dynamics but different powers and different family configurations.

Pretty much all those people you listed are in the same boat, yes. To the point of parody with most of them. Some of them have had to re-write reality in order to reset their lives and repeat their stories, because there was no where else to take them.


It's not their powers, its the people. The Incredibles have the same power set on 3 of 4. It's just the speedster replacing the torch. The Incredibles work because they are NOT the FF. It's a different set of characters with different personalities and interactions. A set of characters that hasn't spent the last 40 years going through the same motions and driving them entirely into the ground.

The FF is:

Reed is a inattentive and neglectful husband and friend.
Johnny is an immature asshole.
Ben wishes he was a real boy.
Sue should file for divorce.

They've told pretty much every single story imaginable surrounding these four people and their specific personalities. The two main things that made them unique back in the day, are not unique anymore. There are lots of super-hero families and lots of heroes with public identities and fame.

Write a decent script and you can make a decent movie. Even a grimdark one. Write a terrible script and it will almost always be awful. This is where most non-disney superhero films go wrong.

Naturally, people who think they have to go grimdark because it worked for Nolan and want to ride coattails are not likely to value a decent script.

The idea that the FF have covered everything possible is ridiculous. The only real issue they do have is making Mr Fantastic not look like something from Roger Rabbit. But write a decent script and people won't even notice.

I think Fantastic Four is the one major Marvel series I've never really been able to get into. There are runs of just about every other big Marvel book that I've loved. Hell, multiple writers have managed to make guys like Hawkeye and Cyclops interesting over the years, but aside from maybe some stuff with the Thing none of the FF have ever really clicked with me. Dr. Doom tends to be a more interesting and multifaceted character than any actual member of the team.

I find Susan Storm an interesting character.  Richards has a lot of potential to be interesting and they almost managed it with Hornblower, but it was kinda flat.

Season 7 of Archer: X-ARCHER

I'd watch that so hard

There are lots of super-hero families? Name 'em for me.

Public identities is more a sign of how the secret identity and most of the plotlines connected to it is fading as a trope in general.

I'm so happy for this reference because that's all I ever see him as, even on his new show.  Which made his part in Titanic a bit odd.

I didn't say they were boring, Khaldun, I said the culture had moved on from them. Sue Storm isn't a heroine, she's a battered wife who should leave her inattentive douche of a husband. 

Venture Brothers deconstructs the FF4 problems perfectly for me (Because J. Storm is a personality I just want to see burn, not immune from it.) and The Incredibles used the same structure differently.

Incredibles writers knew Storm's personality works better as a rapscallion kid you can enjoy vs. Douchebag Dudebro you want to punch.  They established that even though Mr. I is a self-obsessed douchebag (and he is.) with a midlife crisis he cares for his family. The wife isn't some haggard, helpless woman who just can't  understand why her husband doesn't love her. (And that doesn't fucking play at all today other than on Lifetime movies) Violet was the only one who didn't fit her counterpart, the Thing as perfectly, because their issues were different though at the core they just want acceptance.

And despite doing really well that movie didn't get a sequel because they couldn't come up with what to do next.  Which gives me little hope for FF4 ever pulling this off.

Not like it matters.  They'll just endlessly repeat their origin story.  The last thirty minutes of the movie with the Big Bad is filler.

Tru Dat.

Nobody wants to comment on my biggest problem with the FF?  Sue Storm as the damsel in distress over and over and over....  It is such a core element of so many of their 'classic' stories (and of her powers - the ability to disappear) that telling those older tales on film would come off as sexist in the modern era...

That is only a problem if she gets written that way. Which clearly doesn't have to be and won't be.

In fact, if you want to see how to write Sue Storm, and the fantastic 4 as whole, just watch The Incredibles.

Sue Storm is the true power in the team.

The Summers, The Waynes (adopted is still family), The Cages, The hilarity that is Emma and her Cuckoo's, Arrow and Canary just had a baby, The house of Magnus, Mystiques endless series of bastards, Xaviers endless series of bastards, The kents with their endless stream of kryptonian cousins. The Parkers and all their connections? The Corazon's before they all mostly died ( :( ). Even fucking Wolverine has a brother and son these days.

That's just off the top of my head.




Sue hasn't been a damsel for decades and any writer or director portraying her as such is an idiot and fool.

Cant really comment on the Cages, as I am not very familiar with the material, but pretty much every other set of individuals you listed (other than a possible tiny bit with Peter / Aunt May, and Kent and co) are just that.  Individuals.  They are only "family" either by offhand reference or by blood ties, and are almost never played up in their comics as being a "family" of supers.   The F4 are the only real super "family" that is billed as a family.   The rest, bar a couple of special cases, are much closer to celebrity marriges then families.  Simply saying that Magneto  has kids does not magically make the group of them a "family", in the sense of the word we are looking for here.

The Summers are a family only in that they're related to each other, as SurfD said. By that standard every comic-book character who has a living relative is a "family". As you say, Wolverine is a "family" because Sabertooth and Daken. Any character who was born or who had at some point procreated would be "family". But none of those characters live with their families, their family relationships are not a complex, shifting part of their regular stories but are instead one-dimensional (they fight, or they occasionally team-up, or they vow vengeance when they hear that some family member that they never see has been killed). Wolverine doesn't live under the same roof with his brothers or son, doesn't sit down at Thanksgiving with them, doesn't go on adventures with them most of the time. He doesn't feel defined by his family relationships--he was given family members decades after he was established as a character. Same goes for all of your examples. Hell, Superman and Supergirl in the Silver Age were cousins who generally operated entirely on their own even though they could have been living under the same roof. Comic-books mostly just don't know how to tell stories about families as families, where family life is a basic, integral part of the story.

The FF are almost the only comic-book characters who adventure AS a family, where their family ties ARE the story. That's an important distinction.

I agree though with folks who say that Sue Storm has had a really hard time overcoming the legacy of being the damsel-in-distress. That happened again with the Civil War stuff--ok, she showed great independence in leaving Reed, but then came back to him for no real reason that any writer could offer, and then accepted Reed building the Bridge and doing the whole Council of Interdimensional Reeds thing OR was woefully stupid about the fact that it was going on (e.g., she either passively let him keep going down the road he'd been on in Civil War or she didn't know enough about him to know that he was). The Incredibles was able to rewrite that character role by starting fresh--but also it took making the husband somebody other than Reed.

That's really the problem--Reed is usually written as a Mary Sue-ish plot-device who gets the characters out of a jam, rather than a really flawed person who has his own character arc. The most classic modern FF arc, John Byrne's time on the book, did good character work on everyone but Reed, keeping Reed as the sane, level-headed grown-up in the room. Later writers have made Reed's character arc, "Should I be a god or not" which is, let's say, much worse.

Writers have also never known quite what to do with the Ben Grimm-Sue Storm relationship. It's not a great family story if you have to leave one major relationship underexplored. There are a lot of ways to give that relationship some more detail and texture without going towards the obvious "friend has affair with buddy's wife" territory.  Like if Sue and Ben went out drinking together fairly often just for the two of them to talk about how frustrating Reed can be.

Which is pretty much how Reed and Sue's wedding was portrayed in Marvels.

Edit: As someone who has only read scattered issues here and there, can someone point me to an arc that actually does something interesting with the FF themselves (as opposed to being worth reading because it introduced some other important Marvel character or did something interesting with Dr. Doom).

I hope they do get the X-Men TV show off the ground as they've always had a big soap opera element which seems more suited to television than movies. I look forward to watching Scott worry about how his girlfriend's transformation into a genocidal alien being of immense power affects their relationship, while a Shi'ar spaceship hovers overhead.

You'd think a well-written X-Men show would be able to tap into the market for young adult stuff as well. Having crazy, scary powers manifest in your teen years only to discover you are part of a noble yet misunderstood group of heroes is pretty much the archetypal young adult story, I'd have thought.

On the Fantastic Four, I think writers have done the "it turns out Sue Richards is actually the strongest member of the team!!" thing so often that it's almost taken for granted now. She's certainly not the damsel in distress any more.

The trailer reminded me of Prometheus for some reason. The portentous stuff about seeking answers maybe.

I would start here.

http://www.amazon.com/Fantastic-Four-John-Byrne-Omnibus/dp/0785158243/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422568126&sr=8-1&keywords=fantastic+four+comic+books+john+byrne (http://www.amazon.com/Fantastic-Four-John-Byrne-Omnibus/dp/0785158243/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422568126&sr=8-1&keywords=fantastic+four+comic+books+john+byrne)

$1 a page.  :drill:

I think you meant 10¢ per page.

Well one of them is black now, so its totally different.

My favorite FF story is the one they did on Venture Bros.

Yeah and he is the immature asshole. RACIST!

Sue hasn't really been the damsel since John Byrne did FF in the 80s, and you could always take old stories and just put a different damsel in their place.

One problem is that Reed has been handled terribly. Another is that the nature of serialized super hero comics makes doing a thoughtful family-centric book hard. Mostly though I think it's just that the FF has had a string of bad writers or writers who were bad for it.

What happens in the comics doesn't really matter like at all.  The reason F4 is a thing is the same reason any other super hero property is a thing, they happened to be the popular ones at the one and only time in history people cared about comic books.  The only "recent" super hero property worth a damn is deadpool, and he's not even from this century.  I don't understand why Marvel thinks cancelling the fantastic four comic or killing wolverine affects anything at all, nobody at all cares about the comic book versions of those characters. 

Except they do....

If you evolve the character in the comics by killing it, replacing the person in the suit, etc... it enters the mainstream media.  A lot of people that once read comics register it.  It becomes something more than just words on a page.  Superman, Batman, Captain America, Wolverine, etc... dying gets on CNN.  Thor becoming Thorella, Miles in the Spidey suit, Rhodey becoming Iron Man - these all made national headlines, too.   It undermines the traditional notion of the character and creates reasons for the public to say, "This is a dated concept".

It isn't exactly a tidal wave that sweeps the movies aside and makes them fail all by itself, but it does have an impact ...

It doesn't have an impact at all. People who get their comic book news from CNN aren't going to care enough to remember 24 hours after hearing about it that a woman is Thor now, let alone still be thinking about that by the time the next Thor movie comes out.


We'll never know if any of the speculation is true that Marvel was doing any of that stuff to undermine the movies. With all the Secret War/reboot stuff coming up it's quite likely that stuff will be undone in a matter of months anyway.

Changes in comic books never stay around long enough for people to give a shit.  Not to mention these changes only happen in one line of characters that tend to have mutiple.

" Oh, spiderman is black? that's a crazy change but great!"  "Oh, only in amazing spiderman?  Yeah ultimate/spectacular/fantastic/superawesome and day job spiderman are all still peter parker."

This is what comics do and this is why people do not give two shits about comics anymore.  Fool us with character death once, shame on you, fool us six times? Shame on us.

Given the history of clear lines of 'sabotage' focused on characters that were predominantly not MCU characters, Marvel seems to disagree with you -especially if you look at the timing of the moves.

This was the pre-Disney approach. I can't imagine they'll put up with it indefinitely.

Which is a shame, because imho the continual retelling often in parallel is the best thing about comics.

Sure, if you ignore the fact that they also also made Thor and Cap different characters (and made Iron Man a dick again). But yeah, I'm sure the reason Amazing Spider-man 2 tanked wasn't because it was a bad movie like most of the reviews said, but because everyone at the time knew that Peter Parker was just completely dated and that Doc Ock  (or Miles Morales) was the only real Spider-man. Ignoring of course the cartoon, which still featured Peter Parker and probably had more viewers than any of the Spider-man comics had readers.

Note the use of the word predominantly - if they were all non MCU characters, there would be clearer law suit trajectories.  As for your later argument, I addressed it already a few posts up. 

Don't complain about the overuse of the facepalm and then say things like this.

 :facepalm:

These kinds of changes happen all the time. It makes news, it shakes things up, and it makes the return to the status quo all the more enjoyable.

Hulk was green and dumb, then he was grey and sly, then he was green and smart, then he was a space gladiator, then there was a red hulk. Spider-Man was a clone, he was married, he wasn't married, he wasn't a clone. The Thing got even more spiky, was replaced with a woman, came back less spiky again. Superman was killed and replaced by 4 dudes. None of these is sabotage, it's par for the course. Temporary change is a constant in comics.

It's possible that Marvel is thinking "why put a lot of effort into properties we don't own in movie form?" But Wolverine is coming back - let's get real! Part of the point of killing him off is the buzz they get when he returns. FF has been considered a struggling / low-quality / in-disrepair book for a decade or more now.

If you want to point at things Marvel is doing to cater to the movies a better example is something like increased emphasis on the Inhumans, since Inhumans are sort of subbing in for mutants in the movies and TV.

Or the complete Marvel Comic universe being completely rebooting this coming summer to match the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the changes made to characters.

I might pick up an Iron Man and see how it goes then.  Will Spidey be Morales or Ock or Parker in this new universe?

It's awesome and funny that the MCU is now the 'official' Marvel continuity. 

The Thing was a woman ?  Uh ?

Wasn't Ben Grimm obviously, but yes there was a She-Thing.

Edit: Apparently there is now also a "Miss Thing".

#whitenerdjokes

I don't think it's a given, by the way, that the Secret Wars thing ends with a MU that matches the MCU. If nothing else because they still see the comics as a testing ground for intellectual property of value, which means in part that they still want to be able to rummage through past stories and want to keep all the characters they've created in circulation somehow. I would just think that they're going to slough off some of the complexity of the way some of their popular characters are spread over different realities and alternate times. But there's only so much compression you can do--if you put Miles Morales in the same universe as Peter Parker, he's not exactly Miles Morales any longer (given that he's defined in part by being Peter's successor). There's a big difference between choosing 616 FF and Ultimate FF (Ultimate FF are nasty and depressing). Etc.

The MCU has been altering the 616 for years. Nick Fury, Jr. is just one concrete example, as is the emergence of Phil Coulsen in the comics. The MCU will continue to pick and choose the good parts of the 616 and Ultimates (things like the Winter Soldier story) while not giving a fuck about adhering to any sort of status quo established in any Marvel Comic ever.

The top seller in paper comics for the month of Dec. 2014 was Batman with 113k with the middle of the pack books selling less than 10k. Trust me when I say this, movie execs give not two fucks about maintaining any sort of parity with numbers that paltry. They just fucking don't, nor should they.

For the most part they already match up pretty well. Black Nick Fury is probably the biggest difference.

They are never going to match up in terms of events - there are a lot more comics and the movies are a "best of" version picking from different parts of history. A full 99% of the comics stuff doesn't even exist in the movies, to get them to match the comics would have to pare down and stay down to a few dozen characters. Even if they tried to somehow reboot and make them match exactly Marvel has such poor control (or to spin it positively: grants them creative freedom) of their writers that they would diverge again almost immediately. Someone is going to say "hey, what if Iron Man was replaced with a Skrull posing as an Asian woman?" and they'll do that for a while.

I suspect that at the end of the reboot black Spider-Man will be around in addition to normal Spider-Man, black Nick Fury will replace white Nick Fury, the Ultimate universe will be gone and that will be pretty much it. I mean, of course other stuff will happen, and maybe they'll use the opportunity to clean up some shit like red hulks or whatever, but there's no way it's going to end up being the MCU.

There have always been concurrent different versions of Marvel guys. Cartoons, TV, movies, comics, newspaper comic strips. As long as the rough details are the same the specifics don't matter all that much or confuse / turn off the audience.

Actually, wasn't ultimates nick fury modeled after Sam Jackson before the movies?

Yes. Legend is it's how they got Sam to do the part.

Yeah, he was drawn to look exactly like Sam Jackson.

What I meant by "black Nick Fury is the biggest difference" is that black Nick Fury exists in the Ultimate Universe, which is likely going away. The Nick Fury in the main Marvel Universe (AKA 616) is totally different.

That Nick Fury is extremely old at this point and I don't think many people are particularly tied to him emotionally so I assume Sam Jackson Fury will become the canonical version. The white Fury backstory is horrible outdated (he's a WW2 vet but unlike Cap he wasn't frozen in ice so wtf) and he's drawn as Mr Fantastic with an eye patch so he could use a rework.

There was always some horseshit about how Fury had gotten some kind of formula that let him live longer, but that didn't really work when he used to be palling around SHIELD with his old Howling Commandoes buddies. Wow, they all got it? You can't do with him what was done with Reed and Ben, who started their careers as WWII vets also, but eventually that just dropped out of their backstories.

I still feel like the FF have some real life in them. Maybe it'll turn out that it was right to try something really different, if this film actually is really different.

I'm still going to puke if Doctor Doom turns out to be an unpleasant blogger.

Haven't they updated it since to make him a GamerGater?

 :why_so_serious:

It's all about ethics in secret projects to travel to other dimensions!

And you didn't mention Power Pack?

Craigslist ad that looks like viral marketing for the film:

http://mashable.com/2015/04/10/craigslist-fantastic-four-wanted/

Or it's just a jokey post like many on craigslist

I'm looking forward to the next reboot where Ben Grimm and Johny Storm are a couple.

I'll just wait for the sequel to the best Fantastic Four movie (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-incredibles-2-is-finally-happening-as-brad-bird-confirms-he-has-started-writing-the-script-10173226.html).

I just can't get myself to care about this movie.  I don't hate the Fanastic Four but the direction the whole thing took is a put off to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRoD28-WgU

Full trailer... still meh.

Slightly less meh for me. I think maybe the whole dimensional-travel as replacement for space-travel is going to be just fine. I'm even getting a good sense that the FF are still about mystery, and that their personalities are actually starting to feel right.

Doom is the thing that either has to work or if not, sink the whole film.

These FF movies are just non-starters because they continually make terrible casting choices.  Evans and Chiklis were the only two good choices the first time around.  This time maybe Sue looks ok but the rest of that cast looks terrible.  Especially bad is college freshman Reed Richards.  Turning Richards into Peter Parker really wasn't the way to go.

And when are these Fox producers going to understand that Doom is a man in metal armor, not a dude that turns into metal.  The one glimpse of Doom in this trailer certainly didn't inspire any confidence they got it right this time, either.

Yeah, I'm not really feeling this one. That's not to say I won't go see it, but I'm not getting the awesome vibes that I get from other actual Marvel properties. The Sue Storm/Johnny Storm casting I had a problem with at first, but they seem fine to me. They seem to be leaning HEAVILY on the Utlimate universe version of Reed Richards though, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

God, I don't think so, unless they're going to turn him into a mega-villain. The Ultimate Reed is a very bad guy.

Really ?  I stopped reading it after the first couple of books and they turned Doom into a Demon.

What's Reed done ?

Do this as the Ultimate Reed and then when the X-men and FF finally fold into MCU in 10 years, let this Reed cross over as bad guy Reed (sort of like the 'real comics' is going to do).

Pretty sure if Marvel gets any of their stuff back it's going to be rebootville.  Just like with Spidey.

Ultimate Reed was eventually the major villain of the entire Ultimate universe, pretty much. Long after that whole thing became totally fuckstupid.

so, long after Ultimate Spidey's 1?

Ultimate Spider-Man was actually pretty good, I thought.

He's certainly helping the New Avengers become total bad guys in that New Avengers book (granted I'm about 13 issues from the current one so this may have changed).

I really liked all the initial Ultimate Universe stuff they did.  I cannot fathom why they decided to destroy it all so thoroughly.

I'm assuming you didn't read the Jeph Loeb one where the Blob ripped open the Wasp's chest and ate her and then Giant-Man bit off the Blob's head in retaliation.

:ye_gods:

I take it that was zombies ?

Nope.  Just one of their silly world events.  They killed off several big characters in that one, if I remember correctly. 

Then I refer you to the  :ye_gods: the learned gentleman gave some time ago.

"Reed Richards is a scientific prodigy who has been quietly exploring the universe's deepest mysteries in his garage, after school. After being transformed by one of his experiments, he can warp the space around him, and appear to stretch his body into impossible forms and to incredible lengths."

I don't even know why they would think this change is a good idea.  This seems like another "just cause" reason to change a character.

It is just an explanation that seems more 'grounded' than a man stretching.  Instead of bending himself, he bends space around himself.  It looks the same to third parties... 

Much ado about nothing.

I mean, it doesn't matter really because in the movie it will be, at most, a throwaway line of dialog about his powers.  But on the other hand it's just another bit of evidence that they are taking a really simple, fun, comic and just trying too hard with it.  But that was obvious from the grimdark teaser we all saw already anyway.

To be honest the only thing interesting about fantastic four guys like doctor doom, galactus, silver surfer, maybe some other major supervillian.But as a group...they suck. They've been rotting in a cave of irrelevance since the 90s cartoon, that no one remembers.... Sure we can say "oh but the incredibles were totally fantastic four done right." But that's nostalgia talking. The FF4 never been that awesome. Ben Grimm is the only personality worth talking about needing to be on screen. The rest? Err....

Oh man, a Hulk/Thing team up action comedy would be awesome.   :awesome_for_real:

Lest my earlier comment be mistaken - I have no confidence in this film based upon the totality of circumstances.  This explanation of Reed's powers, however, is just people piling on. 

If/when this movie fails, what is the over/under in how long before there is an official announcement from Marvel and Fox that the FF are coming home....

"Pretend it's an egg.  Pretend Everything is an Egg."

That event (Ultimatum) is what I was referring to when I said they decided to fuck it all up.   :awesome_for_real: 
Everything started going downhill across the books after the second ultimates run (and the third one was terrible).

New trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAgnQdiZFsQ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAgnQdiZFsQ)

Looks like they are going to completely screw up Doom, again.

FF4 90210!

Yeah, I'm still not feeling it.

I don't absolutely hate everything about it but it's not grabbing me either.

Nope.  Just wrong.

Soo, Doom is from another universe?   :oh_i_see:

I get the feeling there will be 5 initial interdimensional explorers, one of whom will be lost while the other 4 will return with special powers. The 5th will be Victor Von Doom and time will work differently in the other dimension, so when he comes back he's spent decades there and gotten his shit all strunk and is a bit pissed.

Is there a term movies that highly focused on photogenic 20ish folks for no reason but they are young and photogenic? Because it looks like this FF is exactly that.

Okay that's a TV trope not a movie trope, but still.

See Trippy's reply a page back.

edit: beaten by the man himself... like fucking Voldemort, he appears when you say his name.

From the shot of the dimensional travel device thing, there are only 4 slots. 

Photogenic ?  Reed is ugly as fuck and has some shit all over his face for the trailer and Mara is just NOT Sue.  She's really, really not.

Fuck sake.

And Thing looks like Fried Chicken Man.

Thing's got no... thing either.  Alicia Masters would be sad.

UGH. Weeping now. Not exactly surprised, but still... weeping.

(http://i47.tinypic.com/2e1axrq.gif)

A lot of this tracks pretty close to Ultimate Fantastic Four, so I wouldn't be surprised if Doom is a smart-as-Reed guy who is working at Dr. Storm's lab who sneaks in at night to use the interdimensional travel dingus when nobody's looking, maybe because he's pissed that Reed gets all the attention.

The Thing having no thing is sort of close to some long-standing speculation about the regular Marvel character, and why he's as bitter as he is about his transformation, especially early on. A lot of people think that's what inspired Paul Chadwick's character Concrete--a sort of "what if we took more seriously what it would mean to be turned into an alien rock man with no penis" premise.

Though the regular Marvel version of the Thing does eat and he does crap--he's been drawn sitting on the crapper now and again.

Yeah, the kid scene and machine is stolen directly from Ultimate 4.

If we stop watching these bad movies, especially in theaters, then the license will revert to someone that cares about the characters.

You know what would have been a nice twist?  Doom follows the Four in a rescue mission because he's a nice guy who cares about his co-workers but gets stuck/zapped himself.  The injuries drive him a bit mad.  He's still not completely evil, but does get deluded into thinking his methods help everyone, then it just escalates as supers oppose him.  That would be a sympathetic villain that might be interesting.

He's always most interesting when he's just this side of sympathetic. The Byrne story where it's just plausible that he's a better ruler for Latveria than any other contender is a good example. Or frankly the current Secret Wars stuff, where Dr. Strange has had to concede that Doom is actually pretty good at being a god who is defending the very last of reality against its enemies.

Yeah as a villain Doom works best as a super competent Dick Cheney or a Mark Millar Reed Richards. Which is kind of a problem with the Mark Millar Reed Richards.

The Mark Millar Reed Richards has a WHOLE host of problems much more major than the one you list.  :why_so_serious:

The last great Doom portrayal was Mark Waid's, in which Doom trades in the metal armor for some magical armor and goes whole hog on selling his soul to the devil to save his mother's soul from eternal damnation. Then Millar comes along and ignores all of it.

I hated the visual redesign of the armor in that, though. And it left the character in a kind of broken state, so I'm not surprised that later writers (including but not exclusively Millar) just ignored the story.

It wasn't that they ignored the story that bothered me, it's that they ignored all the consequences of it. He went from "I'm all about the magic!" to "I'm the same old Doom you knew before and we're just going to handwave away what was the last good motivation I've had in a decade." It was a reset to a status quo without really any purpose other than "this writer wanted to use old Doom and not THAT Doom." Of course, I also dug the visual tweak to the armor in that story as well.

It's okay guys! Individually this movie may appear stupid, but if we all work as a team and combine our snark...

 :uhrr:

#squadgoals

!
Let our snark combine!

Green!

Tits!

Dmart!

Grump!

Hate!

By your powers combined I am Captain Snark!!!

That will be a million dollars, movie makers.

I never read that storyline as a whole but just that part of it (all magic Doom) to me seems to contradict what Doom is (magic + science) and the one issue I did read made it feel that Doom implicitly conceded that Reed was the better scientist. That's an automatic fail for the entire story line in my book. And trying to free his mother isn't something new either.


At any rate if the movie had Annihilus or any other Negative Zone character as the main villain I would probably at  least pirate watch this, but you can't get Doom wrong and expect me to care about this movie.

The opening to the storyline is totally worth it, though. Possibly the most villainous thing Doom has ever done, and wholly in line with his character.

Rotten Tomatoes currently has this at 9% from critics (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fantastic_four_2015/). Compare that to Ant-Man's 80% (from critics) and the last Fantastic Four movie (the Silver Surfer one) at 37%.

This one has bomb written all over it. I'm still trying to decide whether I want to waste the money and time for it on the opening weekend of the Premier League.

lol

Why?  This is one you'd feel bad about pirating simple because you wasted the bandwidth.

Soneone go watch it and tell us all about it!

Who'll take the hit for the ol' f13 team?

It takes a special level of sucktitude to be WORSE than the Silver Surfer movie.

If this is real, then I really have no idea why any of you would go see this...

(http://media.giphy.com/media/FlOFLBakLqcBW/giphy.gif)

It does seem like every time the Thing hits something or lands on it, shit explodes in the trailer. Maybe he's passing extradimensional gas?

https://twitter.com/FB_BMB/status/628681852052721664

That sounds fucking terrible and is falling in line with everything else I'm hearing about this.

I'm stunned that this movie is a train wreck.  Wait, no.  What's the most opposite of stunned that you can be?  Because that's what I am.

I will not see this film.

So does this mean that Trank is the new Uwe Boll?   :awesome_for_real:

Maybe the reverse Boll, since he did actually start his career with a good movie.

Fun fact: The Reverse Boll is the most requested item on the menu at German whorehouses.  :why_so_serious:

Here is that naming scene, for anyone interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSMg_GWiBt0

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CLxmlwXVEAAZ60w.png)

Nothing I saw while watching this suggested to me that there was a better movie in there that just got screwed over with reshoots, editing, and studio interference. There's just very little in this movie that works. Like I said, the closest they get is the scene with Reed, Johnny, and Victor after finding out they won't be making the first trip, and even that comes across odd due to Sue's absence and Ben's last minute inclusion.

Dude was kicked off of Star Wars apparently due to a mix of the fact that his movie was turning out poorly and his behavior during the FF shoot. People seemed very eager to throw him under the bus in a very personal way, so I'm tempted to believe the rumors. Usually rumors about troubled movies are about reshoots and such, not that the director is trashing the house he's staying in, impossible to work with, etc.

This tweet certainly supports the idea that he has attitude issues.

How can you think that Trank is at fault? Aldon Smith vouched for him! More ways in which this movie is being discarded: the X-men team is clarifying that FF takes place in a different universe.

Trank was championing the movie til it came out to shitty reviews.

the X-men team is.....

Distancing themselves as far and as fast as they can before the smell of shit lingers on their movies.

They already got some practice with erasing the third X-men movie from the timeline and politely ignoring the first Wolverine movie when it comes to Deadpool and Gambit. It's a little late for them to pretend they have anything resembling a cohesive canon.

X-men 3 and Wolverine: Origins are supposed to both be whacked out of continuity.

Days of future past was supposed to reset all the stupid shit that happened before.

Saw this, but not by choice.  It's pretty bad, but not super awful.

That is to say, I don't recommend seeing it.  But if you're dragged along, keep your expectations low, and are willing to snark at the CGI, the dialog, the plot, and everything else, you'll probably survive without any significant sanity lost.

(http://peeltheorange.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Capture1.jpg)

Was there a "give it back to Marvel" option?

It should be the only option.   :awesome_for_real:

It's the only one that makes sense, but considering there's not enough money in that for Fox, I don't see it happening. I'm not even sure they'd go for a Spider-Man/Sony sharing kind of deal. Marvel really just has to wait long enough for the property to devalue so that they can get the rights back for less than $50 million.

When's the next time Fox has to make one in order to keep the license? That's when it's being sold to Marvel, if ever. They'll wait otherwise, hoping that either the property's value goes up for some unknowable reason or in case they get a new team of people in the door who actually have an idea for this franchise that isn't a turdbomb.

The io9 review is especially good/perceptive: the film was doomed to stink because both Trank AND the suits at Fox who were in charge of developing this property don't like or understanding superheroes generally and don't like the FF in particular. I liked Chronicle well enough but you could see even there that Trank was somewhat glum and deconstructive in his view of the genre.

http://io9.com/fantastic-four-is-the-most-self-loathing-superhero-movi-1722651722

Fox doesn't like or understand Sci-Fi on the whole. Neither the movies, the TV or the publishing wing have ever done right by the genre by anything other than accident.

When you look at the whole of their filmography the way they treat superhero/ sci-fi properties starts to make a lot more sense. IMO, at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_20th_Century_Fox_films_(1935%E2%80%931999)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_20th_Century_Fox_films_(2000%E2%80%93present)

So many films that are overwrought comedy or dudebro in nature. Something that takes itself seriously while understanding that it's still in camp territory like Marvel has done is beyond Fox as an organization.  It's a company culture thing at this point, IMO. No way to move past that easily.

While I never wanted this film to be bad, now that the verdict is in and it's due to sink from theatres without a trace within a fortnight ($26.2 million opening weekend putting it behind Mission Impossible 5 in its second week is pretty fucking catastrophic for a film of this size and a franchise this well known), I'm really, really hoping that someone in Fox understands the term 'hemorrhaging' and they sell the rights back to Marvel to simply recoup some of the losses this film is going to cause them. At this point it's in the air whether it'll even make budget back.

I don't worry so much for anyone involved (besides some heavily sweating Fox execs), none of the cast will be tainted and even Trank could come out of this ok; this is his second film and Fincher screwed the pooch with his debut Alien³ both directorially and relationship-wise with Fox yet went on to bigger things.

Green Lantern was considered a disappointment with a 52 million opening weekend, and that didn't include any early thursday showings.

Fox was back in the news again a day or two ago saying that negotiations with Marvel allowing Fox to do an X-men TV series are going well and that they're expecting to be able to announce something soon. I really wouldn't be surprised if selling the FF rights back to Marvel ends up as part of the deal now.

Also Entertainment Weekly has a decent article up about the whole Trank situation. (http://www.ew.com/article/2015/08/07/fantastic-four-josh-trank-tweet) Nothing really new in there and we're never really going to know exactly what happened, but it's a good examination about what various anonymous sources on all sides have been saying.

"It’s partly linked to Trank’s personal disputes – involving accusations of deliberate damage done to the house he was renting, as revenge over a dispite with the landlord – which sources say eventually manifested on set as hostility and frustration from Trank. "

Nerf?

Even though I used my free points to see this, I still feel like I wasted my money.  It makes the first 2 FF movies look like God damn masterpieces.

I just wish they could do a FF movie that doesnt somehow manage to turn Doom from one of the best Marvel villians into some thrid rate hack with some kind of cgi skin condition....  Maybe if marvel gets the rights back we will see a Doom worthy of the name

With the way they handle their villains in the movies, maybe not so much. Ideally if Marvel got the FF back, I'd like to see them do a Netflix Doom series focusing on him when he's growing up in Latveria.

Films do have a complicated problem with fully-masked villains. Not many actors want to take a role where you don't see them very much, especially a role where the mask conceals everything about the face. It takes away your biggest tool as an actor, and you can't use some of the same visual tricks the comics can to give a masked character facially-registered emotions.

But also you just can't do Doom or the Fantastic Four unless you're willing to go full comic-book. There's no halfway or dialed down version of Doom that works.

It's a challenge, but hardly an unknown one. Not least since VO and motion capture work has become so central to modern movies.

Also, not sure I agree the DrDoom or F4 *must* go full silver age, or must have the mask in every film.  If you write and direct well you can do whatever you like.  Doom's only consistent  defining character traits are ego, open disdain for others and being smart, this isn't new territory to work in.

For my money the toughest part of F4 to adapt into a non-comic film is Mr Fantastic, who has a ridiculous superpower and a character that quickly becomes dull unless well written or played for laughs.

Iron Man found a great solution to the problem did it really well. There's no reason to get an "inside the suit" view of Doom like we do Tony & Jarvis, though.

The villainy development part has been covered by other writers really well. We have one well-developed villain in the MCU right now: Loki. He's only such because we've seen him in multiple movies. If he was only in Thor then dead he'd be as badly moustache-twirling as every other one.

Even Thanos is surprisingly underdeveloped for as many movies as he's referenced. "evil guy who grimaces and smirks" isn't much better than "guy who goes into psychotic rage for reasons we get one or two throwaway lines about."  In his development they're playing too much up to the comics fans and not enough to "show, don't tell" for the moviegoers.

Darth Vader was fully masked way back in 1977.  You'd think someone could manage a fully masked Doom today.

And you'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside of rabid fanboys who know the actor's name inside that mask. Hell, I'd bet most people think it was Jones.

It'd be interesting to see a Netflix series about Villains that gives us some extra time developing the villains of the MCU. It could lay bonus groundwork for villains in upcoming movies. It could give us some time to catch up with Villains that have not been seen in a while. It could tell stand alone stories about villains that don't need a hero to tell interesting stories. A few antiheroes like Black Cat that cover both sided of the coin could also get some time...

Only outside the UK. For people of a certain age in the UK, he'll always be the Green Cross Code Man.

So?

The problems with Doom in both iterations of the FF movies has hardly been related to the actor or whether or not he has a goddamn mask. Visually, both Doom's have been shit, but the real killer seems to have been the writer's and director's inability to make the character worth a shit. Both seem to apologize for having the villain in there and have tried to take him completely out of the comic roots or any sort of 4-color characterizations.

Superhero movie writers and directors need to either stop being embarrassed of doing superhero movies or don't do them at all. Here's a hint - if you hate the very concept of superheroes, don't take a job that forces you to work on a tentpole franchise type superhero movie. Do something small and indy like Super (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512235/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_21).

Don't forget V for Vendetta either. Hugo Weaving is outstanding playing V and he is masked the whole movie.


Another excellent masked character that got a lot out of color and shape and light.

Hugo Weaving would make a great Doom.  The only way Doom works is if you go all out with him, like his marvel heroes version.

Yeah, it's a solveable problem.

I think that doing Doom right is just a matter of right actor, right screenwriter. I almost imagine him like a more malevolent Doctor Who. In fact, Matt Smith would be pretty good in the role. Basically imagine Elon Musk combined with Stalin and combine that with the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, or Teller and Oppenheimer. Weaving would also be good.

Which also makes me think that Reed Richards needs to be the Oppenheimer--more principled, maybe a bit less of a genius but also a slow-and-steady wins the race.

Doom does not tolerate those unwilling to fully commit.

I'm starting to think the only way you can do a Fantastic Four movie is to actually make a Doctor Doom movie and have the Fantastic Four be the antagonists.

Day one viewing.

Doom basically just needs to be competent, excessively so. Like Doom's baseline would be the lifelong goal of another villainous organization.



I'm kind of amazed this latest FF movie is somehow worse then all expectations. Those expectations were already like rock bottom low and it's managed to dig itself underneath them.

Excessively competent, excessively arrogant, speaks in third person, the only reason he is not a joke is because he can actually completely back up his shit talking and arrogance.

Basicly an evil Tony Stark.

This. That's what it needs--someone w/Downey Jr.'s cockiness but without any of the saving graces. Doom in the films has to be kind of fun, in an odd way--more fun than he is in the comics, where if you're paying attention he actually fucks up quite a bit and sometimes rather hilariously so. (Though right now he's doing a pretty good job of uber competence on a cosmic scale).

To put it another way, while lots of villains claim that they should rule the world because they would do a better job of it... when Doom says that he might actually have a case.

And in news that surprised literally fucking nobody, Fox are doubling down. From CBR:


You have no idea what to do with these characters, you grasping fuckwits.

Honestly, this would be understandable if it was just the one fuck-up, but all 3 (technically 4) Fantastic Four movies have been a case of severely declining diminishing returns, both in gross and in critical and audience perception. Clearly they believe they can offset their FF related losses enough that flipping the bird at Disney is somehow a financially viable business move.

This is about all you could expect them to say, especially while the movie is still in theaters. Even if they've decided they're done trying and would entertain an offer from Disney, publicly saying that they're ready to cut the franchise loose would only weaken their end of the negotiations.

WE HAVE SO MANY PLANS FOR THESE SHITTY MOVIES YOU WILL HAVE TO OFFER US SO MUCH $$$ WE LOVE FF4 NOM NOM

At this point I'm going to assume Fox execs are the same guys who sit at a slot machine feeding quarters in forever.

It will pay off eventually. The machine will get hot ANY MINUTE. Just gotta keep plugging away.

I think they just don't care enough except to infuriate the fans into indirectly demanding someone buy the franchise from them.  Or: they love money, not movies.

Hey guys, maybe the Fantastic Four just suck.

Spoiler: They do.

The Fox executives and the Marvel/Disney executives despise each other as people. They are going to keep making FF movies and hold onto the rights purely on spite.

I got no love for the FF. I just want Doom. The MCU needs another villain you can actually root for besides Loki. And Fox clearly have no idea what they own.

They're on ok enough terms that Fox seems to think their negotiations for the X-Men TV series are going well (http://www.newsarama.com/25468-x-men-close-in-on-tv-deal-according-to-20th-century-fox.html).

Amazing Spider-man 2 made $700 million, presumably making it profitable if not as much as Sony would have liked, and they still ended up having to work out a deal with Disney. FF just lost Fox a fuckload of money, plus they already want a favor from Disney. Like others have said, I think the FF themselves are probably the least valuable part of their franchise (Doom, the Skrulls, Galactus, the Silver Surfer and probably by extension all the Heralds and other members of Surfers supporting cast, I would assume the Watcher, and who knows what else), but I'd be very surprised if Fox doesn't make a deal with Marvel giving them back the rights within the next year.

Edit: Snipped out some numbers for now that were confusingly listed on Boxofficemojo. Will correct and reinsert later (their website is having some problems at the moment).

You're assuming anything other than the F4 themselves is off limits to disney.

Based on the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver thing, it seems more likely anyone who has been in a book outside of F4 is fair game. Not that anything on that list except Doom is really worth arguing over.

But if I were Disney I'd leave Fox to it, they really are not short on characters, and spending any effort on C listers like F4 when Wolverine is still out there makes no sense. That said, spending time and money on Spiderman at this point in time also makes no sense to me.

For me, getting the F4 back is more about getting the villains, realms, and peripherals from the F4, but I do think Marvel could do something good with the F4. I'd love to see them get the rights back and to see F4 be film 2 of phase 4.

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver seem to be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the deals they made. That situation wasn't as simple as "well these characters appeared in a book outside X-men". Those characters have been a part of the Avengers since shortly after the book started (Scarlet Witch in particular has been pretty important throughout the majority of the Avengers 50+ year history).

Saw this over the weekend and wow...it just feels so...empty.  :oh_i_see:

I had to check online to confirm it's not part of the MCU, which makes a lot of sense considering how soulless it felt.

Frank has apparently retained counsel ... I think the story behind the scenes will make b a better movie than the movie.

You mean Trank?

Yes... autocorrect when I am on my phone is a pain.

More Gossip About the Production Problems on FF4 (http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2015/08/12/fantastic-four-production-problems-josh-trank?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+geeksofdoom+%28GEEKS+OF+DOOM%29)

Some of that shit is cray cray. Telling actors when to blink and breathe. No thanks, Stanley Foobrick, we can do that all on our own. It also looks like while Trank may well be a moonbat fuckwit, Fox's lack of vision on this contributed as much to the failure as anything Josh CrazyPants did.

If you're telling them when to breathe and blink in almost every scene, it is crazy. If you're giving them direction for the second take after they do something weird on first, it isn't weird at all. Heck, there are directions where to blink and breathe written into some scripts for certain deliberate scenes. I'm guessing that those directions from him would have been no big deal had thew cast and crew liked and respected him. The real problem seems to be that he wanted the control he had over Chronicle and became unlikable when the studio took over. I hope he manages to leak the script from the version he liked so that people can see what he envisioned. I'd rather read it than see what was released at this point.

Usually by bad writers.

Edit: also, sweeping generalizations needs specific examples. What scripts? Curiosity compels me to ask so I can read them.

One thing that doesn't seem to be in contention is that Trank wanted a grim, gritty, "realistic" FF film. And that's pretty much where it all went wrong no matter what kinds of other shit went down later. Arguably that's even more in violation of the FF's publishing history than it is to make *Superman* dark and gritty. At least there's a few slightly darker takes out there on what happens if an alien comes to a planet and becomes a god (Miracleman, for one). The FF don't have that kind of archetypical, iconic backstory that can be twisted or turned in different ways to get new resonances out them unless you specifically want to do a nostalgia piece on the Cold War a la X-Men First Class and explore some of the slightly darker contours of doing shit like getting in rockets just to beat the Soviets despite the fact that it's mostly untested.

The only other thing you can mess with a bit is the idea of FF as family, but..."grim and gritty" is bad enough when we're talking about gods hitting each other with skyscrapers in a 9/11-inflected world, it's worse when you're playing with tropes of family--all the darker and more realistic stories about families really, really do not mesh well with stories about a brilliant scientist who can stretch his body, his close pal who is a rock monster, his younger wife/GF who can turn invisible, and his impulsive slightly dickish brother-in-law who lights on fire. I mean, there's already some kind of interesting family *melodrama* in the FF's history. It's heavily implied Sue has had an affair(s) with the Sub-Mariner, Reed is sometimes distant and paternalistic in a fairly 'realistic' way to his wife and kids, Ben is borderline depressive and has a seriously weird love life, and if Johnny hasn't gotten a venereal disease by now, he should have. Ben and Johnny kid but they've also had fights that have gone right up to the edge of actual harm or even homicide. etc. That's not exactly 'dark' but there's stuff to play with. It's just not the stuff of grim and gritty in the indie style, it's soap operatic/melodramatic.

All the details are going to be hilarious but the conceptual failure here is bigger than Trank or anyone in this production, and it's going to happen again and again until Fox executives learn to stop hating the stuff they're trying to adapt.

Trank had no business jumping into a high budget/profile movie like this off the back of Chronicle, which I didn't even like in the first place.  Marvel is able to pull people in like Gunn and let them run with it, because they have years of stuff in place and a backbone of people that can help them with any problems they have.  Fox doesn't have that and they were really just pushing the movie so they could keep the rights.  If they were smart they would just sit on it til it runs out and let it go back to Marvel.  Marvel has no reason to buy the licenses back right now anyway.  They have so much going on that adding FF to the mix would probably be a mistake at this time.

It seems pretty common these days for directors to skip straight from small darling to large production, I suppose because there aren't many mid-tier budget movies being made.

Or, perhaps, not everything in the world needs to be a trial.  

I don't recall exact situations.   B5 scripts with direction for Claudia Chrstian seem like a good bet - Season 4 and Sleeping in Light most likely.  I read a lot of scripts around the time the B5 scripts were rolling out.  As TV and film are the only places you'd find blink directions, I'm guessing I saw them around that time.  Breath directions are in some musicals, but that is (generally?) more of a survivial guide than a theatrical direction.  

Trank was given chances at smaller budget films - and he turned them down because he couldn't get his way. FOR A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE: Chronicle 2.  That should have been enough to keep insure he did not get F4. 

Not everything is a trial but it's nice to know your persecution complex is alive and kicking.

Some people (and studios) handle it better than others. Colin Trevorrow went from Safety Not Guaranteed (with very little other experience) to Jurassic World.

Yeah, actually, Trank seems to be one of the few people who've stumbled this badly in making this transition. The writer for Chronicle has sort of gently suggested that maybe Trank isn't even as responsible for Chronicle as it might seem, so this could just be a case of a guy who got in over his head almost from the moment that he was recognized as a filmmaker and got more and more freaked out about the gap between what people thought he was and what he actually was. It happens.

You're making baby Jesus cry.

Ok. I decided to sit down and watch the movie that was made in 1994 that was only made so Fox could keep the rights to it. 1 million dollar budget, unknown actors etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVLqs9MrGbw

I know this is going to be heresy but... its not bad at all. its certainly better than the 200 million dollar awkward fests that were made later.

Yeah it takes a while for anything to happen, the special effects are not all that special and the acting isn't that great, and its a campy B movie with a stupidly ridiculous villain, "the Jewler", but the actors really tried. You get to see that these people actually have a believable relationship with one another.  The thing suffers from having his face be a puppet, but aside from that the guy has the character down pat. AND AND Dr. Doom is not bad at all, aside from the fact you cant understand a word he says through the mask  :why_so_serious:

Its not a brilliant movie but I can hand on heart say that it's easily the best of the four Fantastic 4 movies. If you have an hour and a half to kill you could do a lot worse than watch it.

That's not heresy, it's absolute truth. There's a lot to laugh at in that movie, not the least of which is that the thing looks like a fucking plushy bath toy. And Doom manages to chew scenery despite being almost unintelligible behind that mask.

But it beats the shit out of disco dancing Reed Richards and whatever the fuck this new movie looks like it's supposed to be.

DAMN IT.

This is a film I'd have wanted to see: http://www.blastr.com/2015-8-19/original-draft-tranks-fantastic-four-featured-galactus-herbie-and-nyc-action (http://www.blastr.com/2015-8-19/original-draft-tranks-fantastic-four-featured-galactus-herbie-and-nyc-action)

I haven't seen the latest F4 movie, but that sounds fucking dumb.

I think I was right. Fantastic Four just suck.

Correct me if I am wrong (as it has been a while since i watched the first FF movie), but one of the things that bugs me about the FF franchise under Fox is that they always keep trying to tie Doom's Origins directly to the FF's origins.  Why do they do that?  Other then the fact that Doom and Reed are usually mentioned as being Acquaintances / Rivals of a sort before they became "powers", Doom's origin usually has absolutely nothing at all to do with the FF's origin, and I think attempting to link them just to shorten the exposition of the story severely weakens it.

I honestly really like the idea of doing a Doom movie and having the FF as the antagonists tho.  A Super Hero movie told partially or entirely from the "Villians" point of view could actuallly be very interesting, and Doom is probably one of the most complex "villians" in the Marvel Universe.

FF needs to be embraced to work.  That script description seems to embrace what makes the FF - the FF.  You can't apologize for Reed being a dork.  I don't agree with everything in it, but it sounds a lot better than what I've heard about the film that was produced because it has those essential FF elements that the current film seems to be missing.  The tweaks to Doom and the other referenced characters are not ideal - but I'd sure as heck take it over what was released.

The F4 stopping Doom from building his earth saving Galactus cannon is a movie i would have loved to watch.

For some reason movie studios, and especially Fox, are obsessed with this shit. They did the same with the new Spider-Man movies where Peter's parents worked for Oscorp or whatever.

In modern superhero screenwriting it's very in-vogue to make everything connected, make everyone know each other or related, etc. (Call it Star Wars Prequels Syndrome) I suspect part of this is catering to the nerd fanbase that likes to feel clever by spotting connections and knowing lore crap.

To be fair to Spider-Man (and it was Sony that did Spider-Man, not Fox), the comics have hinted if not outright stated that Peter's parents were some form of spy/corporate espionage/researchers.

Yeah, but the comics have also suggested that Norman Osborn and Gwen Stacy had sex the summer before he killed her, so...

It's actually kind of amazing how uninterested Stan Lee and Ditko and then Lee and Romita were in Peter Parker's real parents for a very, very long time. I don't think they were even given names until about six years after he launched, and the back story was only filled in very slowly. I think they were CIA agents? Something like that. There was a convoluted story where some villain faked the parents being alive (without knowing they were connected to Spider-Man, if I remember right). Peter basically never thinks about them except when there's a specific storyline connected to them, which makes sense, since he doesn't remember them. He has enough weird parental shit going on with his fixation on Aunt May, after all--this is the guy who made a deal with Satan to give up being married to a hot supermodel so that a frail 80-year old woman could live another year or two.

Yes but both of those stories (the One More Day and Gwen Stacy gets freaky with Norman Osborn one) were fucking terrible.

There should be no shock over how stupid some Spider-man stories are.  With the various overlapping titles (Amazing Spider-Man, Web of Spider-man, Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Marvel Team Up, Spider-Ham, etc...) and those years of biweekly releases in summer over the years, I think there is a chance that he may be the most prolific comic character in existence - probably not because Superman and Batman are in so many Justice League books, but maybe... and with that many stories, some have to suck hard. 

Is that the one where the Vulture created Shape shifting androids to pretend to be Peters parents because he figured that Peter had to have some line to Spider-Man becasue of all the Spidey pics he has sold over the years, and the robo-parents were supposed to investigate that line, find out who Spidey was, and kill him.

And that's before the whole thing got REALLY stupid. "Ha hee Ha I have a machine for absorbing powers!!" Vulture accidentally absorbs Robo-Peter-Mommy's powers and becomes 50 years youngler while robo mommy grows old, while Spidey has to fight Robo-Peter-Dad who has become the T-1000 crossed with the Blob. Oh yeah and for some reason they never actually told the Vulture who Spidey was even though that was their mission, and Robo-mommy got all emotional and refuses to carry out her programming because she luves Peter because she's a woman...

I think that was the last Spidey comic I ever read.

Again, I think in Doom's case it's because he's got a complex backstory and if you want to do a more faithful version of the character it requires magic to also be introduced. In the MCU you could pull that off a little easier after Dr. Strange comes out, but it wouldn't fit as easily into an FF movie. The most obvious solution would be not to use Doom in the first FF movie, and save him for the sequel when you don't have to devote time to the FF's origins.

I can honestly see not insisting that Doom have the whole "dictator of Latveria, former gypsy, wants to rescue his sorcerer mommy from Hell, is a super-scientist, got his armor from weird monks in Tibet" background.

I think the core elements have to be:

1) Rivalry with Reed Richards, and some reason to think (wrongly) that Richards is at fault for an accident that disfigured Doom.
2) Is a very gifted scientist with an ego to match.
3) Makes his own armor and hides behind it.
4) Wants to rule a country/conquer the world and has some sort of organization or resources that makes that plausible.
5) Is charismatic when he wants to be. (Can't just be petulant etc.)

Yeah.  They really, really, really DON'T need to do a Doom origin.  They never fucking have had to.  I am always amazed that they try and that the link it to the FF origin.  It was fucking bad in the Ultimate Comics and it's fucking bad in the films.

But again it's what we want versus what we get.    :why_so_serious:

Yes, though in this case it's just fucking stubborn executives who hate comic-booky things in their movies, not "this is the way we make money with a formula plot structure". Doom just feels too comic-booky for the suits, so they always force a change in him.

It isn't just the suits, it's also the people writing and directing this shit.

There is no reason you can't do most of Doom's comic origin: Born to mystic gypsies.  Family dies at the hands of a powerful demonic entity.  Doom blends technology with magic.  Goes to school with Reed and dislikes Reed because Reed is the first rival to his intellect.  Doom is injured by an experiment and blames Reed.  He returns to Latveria and conquers it with technology and magic.  Hatred/Jealousy for Reed, desire to control world, etc... guide him - but in the end he is trying to conquer the world because he truly believes the world is better off under his control.  None of that is too outlandish.  What is generally outlandish are the versions of him in the comics where he is a raving madman.  The more interesting stuff is where he is an overly dramatic megalomaniac genius that might just actually know better than the rest of the world.

I'd LOVE to see MCU get back the FF so that they could do Emperor Doom.  It is a favorite of mine when it was released.  The idea that the world was really better under his hands (in some ways) is something they've revisited a lot.  If they told it over a few movies that spanned several TV seasons...

Basically, the best way to do Doom in movies is to rip off Baron Unterbite from Venture Bros. Sad that a satirical cartoon does a better Doom than dipsticks paid millions to put it on the big screen.

You just listed about 10 sentences of WHY they shouldn't do Doom's origin;  that's almost a damn movie in itself right there and if you try to compress it, well, do you realise how utterly retarded it sounds ?

I'm with Ironwood on this and I like Victor Von Doom in his full comic-book form. There is absolutely no way to get on that all up on screen in a film even if the Fantastic Four aren't in it that doesn't sound like a scene from Venture Brothers (Haemish is totally right) or Danger Five.

Even a good, smart, faithful film treatment needs to edit down the extra elements to the essentials, needs to remove the stuff that takes a Ph.D in comic history to understand. The magic/science stuff, for example, is largely non-necessary--it took twenty years for that aspect of the character to really develop.

I covered it in a paragraph. They did Hulk's origin in 45 seconds. You don't have to live every moment of an origin to establish it... and if they thought it was worth telling, why not tell it in a longer format? Marvel has that option. Look how much Start origin there is in the MCU.

Ok, here's an experiment then ;  take that paragraph to the average joe on the street (the guy the studio actually wants to target) or your mom or something.

Read it to them.

Note well when they say 'wow, that sounds retarded.'

Cry yourself to sleep in your hulk jim-jams.

Doom is a college rival of Reed's who, like Reed is a super scientist, but also knows magic. His outfit is a suit of armor. Done.

You don't need to explain these things in a large fleshed-out story. He's an evil Reed with armor for a costume who also knows magic. That's it. There's nothing particularly strange about having armor for a costume - I mean isn't that the most sane sort of armor to have. You don't need to explain that his face was burned off, or how he knows magic. If the latter is really important you can just say "my parents taught me", if the former is important it can be some big reveal towards the end. Any aspects of his personality like that he wants to rule the world to make it "better" can come out in dialog.

He's an evil Reed who wears armor and knows magic. That's it. It's not complicated, and it's also not any more retarded than Reed being a stretchy guy who wears long underwear.

When Doom and Reed first clash the rest of the FF can be like "Reed - his technology rivals yours. He's as good as you!" and then Doom can say "No, I'm better" and do some magic shit to prove his point.

Yes, you could do a full movie just about Doom but you certainly don't have to. You can do all the essentials in one scene.

At that point he could really be any generic super-villain though and we already have people commenting frequently in these threads about villains in comic book movies not being fleshed out at all. If you're going to use Doom take advantage of it. Otherwise you might as well just use the fucking Mole Man or the Puppet Master. It's like turning Galactus into an energy cloud.

I think Doom does have a potentially interesting backstory if you pick through the best stuff. Fox (and Sony for that matter) have been desperately looking at what they have the rights to and how they could build their own versions of the MCU out of that. I honestly think a Dr. Doom movie could have had a lot of potential in that respect and is also why I think Marvel could do a good Netflix series if they got the rights back.  As the backstory of a villain in a superhero movie, that long winded description jgsugden posted sounds pretty dumb. A story about a family of gypsies living under an oppressive ruler who turn to black magic as a result has possibilities though. Throughout the course of a season or a movie you could see Victor develop as a character who is willing to compromise his morality for what he perceives is the greater good, similar to what we saw with Fisk in Daredevil but with almost more of a horror vibe in an Eastern European setting.

Of course I don't think Fox would do anything like this, although they're doing Deadpool so clearly they're willing to take some risks. I don't really think Marvel would be particularly likely to do it either. I do believe that he's one of the few Marvel villains from the comics though that could carry his own story.

But I think what would really happen is that they would turn him into Jigsaw from Saw and the Heath Ledger Joker - someone whose plans just work because "he is just clever enough to plan out what people will do weeks in advance because...  he's a genius with the power of plot!!! He's plottingtastic!!"

And I really think you don't realize how uninteresting a character like Doom is to an ordinary Soap guy. People have largely had it up to their teeth with shitty anti-hero cop drama and such like at this point, and some guy who wants up as generic evil scientist in a suit of armour? Pass. You think Doom is fascinating because you have been reading his stuff for 20 years. I haven't and to me the guy has always seemed a bit ridiculous with his stupid Reed obsession and easy to mock arrogance. A good analogy would be the Riddler in the Archam games. "I AM SOOOO CLEVER THAN YEW!!! because I hid all this crap all over the place!!" "Yeah whatever, dumnass."

In short I really don't think a Doom TV series would fly and you all would be hear crying that "They just didn't do it riiiight!!!"

What I described is who Doom is, I didn't change the character in any way. There's a happy medium between "turn him into a cloud" and "make a dedicated prequel about how his parents were killed by demons blah blah blah"

Plenty of movies have interesting villains that are not particularly fleshed out. Raiders of the Lost Ark has three of them. You're confusing good villains with villains that have a lot of lore associated with them. Some of the best villains of all time have very little in the way of backstory (and some of the best heroes as well) - Darth Vader, pretty much any character in any Sergio Leone movie (Lee van Cleef, Henry Fonda).

Darth Vader was just a cool costume and voice.

What makes a villain generic is not depth of backstory, it's things like bad dialog, not being relevant to the plot, simple things like costuming, how they are shot, etc. There are good villains like Michael Meyers that don't even talk! It's more of a craft issue than an issue of depth. Jaws is a good villain and he's a shark.


Doom is basically Darth Vader with a different color scheme.

When Vader was introduced he was stepping off a ship that was shown to be immense and powerful compared with the ship he was stepping into. You didn't need acres of back story to know this guy was a badass, it had been shown in the first minute of the movie, and then he emerged flanked by the gunfire of his soldiers, at which point picked up the captain and crushed his throat. There. Memorable character explained.

You didn't need to have half the movie explaining his backstory and his deep heartrending fall into darkness which involved being a Gypsy, his parents being chopped up by demons and then him creating magical tech armour from the deep tech gadgetry that Gypsys have/invented it all from rocks because he's a genius, then how he went to uni and developed this hatred of some other guy because of the tragic fact that he was smarter than him and then got his lightsaber and chopped his way to lead a country, tragically.

I think I just disagree to some extent with what you think makes a good villain or even examples of who good villains are. Belloq is the only Lost Ark villain whose name I can even remember. Jaws was effective largely because of the camera work, which they needed to get around the fact that the Shark prop didn't actually work a lot of the time. Lee van Cleef is menacing as Angel Eyes but is a far less interesting character than Tuco who does get a fairly lengthy monologue explaining his backstory. There are a number of hints as to Vader's backstory which become an increasing focus through Empire and Jedi. I've got no love for Michael Meyers.

I'm not saying that every villain needs their entire life story revealed, but backstory can humanize a character, give them motivation, or allow you to sympathize with them a bit, like Magneto being a holocaust survivor for example. Doom, as a character is largely only interesting when he isn't being written as a straight-up villain. Describing him as evil Reed Richards with magic reduces him to the most clichéd kind of comic book villain. He's the dark reflection of the hero at that point. He's the Iron Monger, the Venom, or the Red Skull. And that's fine for what it is, as a bad guy in a comic book movie, but if that's what you want then you can't really complain that superhero movies are all kinda samey.

That's my main point. It's not that Doom is such a great character that we need multiple seasons of a TV series to bask in his glorious backstory. It's that this is a character who actually could support something other than a typical summer blockbuster comic book movie, and yet people here who often comment on how formulaic superhero movies are coming up with the most formulaic way to work Doom into a movie. Also I'll reiterate that I've never read a single FF comic that I thought was particularly good, have no love for the FF as characters, and would be perfectly happy to never see another attempt at an FF movie, which is part of the reason I'd rather see something Doom focused rather than a fifth attempt at an FF movie involving Doom.

A Sir T post I agree with!

The prequels were all about adding depth to Darth Vader and they sucked shit - the only reason they didn't ruin the character is that the sequels are so bad and Darth Vader so cool that they are essentially non-canon to everyone.

Darth Vader is a bad-ass because the movie tells you that using the language of film. It's not just some character going "this guy is a bad-ass because he has the technobabble bullshit device with the power to destroy the universe", it's because of the way the movie is shot, how characters react to him, how scenes are framed and blocked and lit, etc.

Speaking of character intros:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN3-uOjK4TY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XkHsinz7oU

These are from Once Upon a Time in the West, main villain and hero. These scenes tell you a lot of what you need to know with very little dialog - Frank is willing to kill family, including a kid, and smirks a little when he does it - he enjoys it. He's also clearly the leader of this group.

Harmonica plays his harmonica (important), gets a bad-ass self-confident and wry line of dialog, the bad guys seem wary of him - this is a guy who can handle his shit. He also gets shot - he's not some untouchable action hero. Audiences at the time would also have recognized the guys he kills, so they aren't just disposable goons.

This is how Ronan is introduced in GotG:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQsmIkN7wxg

He's in the fucking fetal position in the first shot! Then the rest of it is voiceover lore bullshit about Xandarians. WHY would you put him in the fetal position? A position that conveys vulnerability and weakness. Is it hinting that he's actually a giant wuss, emotionally or physically?

It might be interesting if you have a villain who seems super bad-ass then later you reveal that he has some internal doubts and sleeps in the fetal position - it could be humanizing, suggest depth, contrast to their godlike powers. But as the first shot it's very weird and it never pays off. His character introduction says that he is a wuss and a bore.

This is a craft issue. It's not a character concept issue.



I didn't write out an entire 120 page script. I just gave an overview of how you can present him at a basic level. You can have dialog that includes other stuff, hints at backstory, etc, just as Star Wars does with Vader.

It's the difference between the Star Wars movies and prequels. All the stuff that was hinted at in Star Wars was made explicit in the prequels to horrible effect.

This has got me plotting out a Doom intro scene now. Picture a top US Delta force team, deep inside someplace called Latveria. They sneak inside some old castle, take out the guards and come in to rescue a Latverian scientist, we get some dialogue explaining who they are, who the scientist is (say some expert in bioengineering being forced to work on a project against his will). At this point there's a cut off radio message from one of the team, then shortly after another. Suddenly cut off gunfire and general confusion from the Spec Ops. At that point the scientist loses his shit and goes 'Doom' before turning near catatonic and the Spec Op guys start getting serious business faces. Cue a short action scene as Doom basically marches in flanked by 2 Doombots and wastes all but one of the soldiers very rapidly. The last one gets disarmed, hoisted up by his neck and informed that American aggression is not welcomed in Latveria, he will be returned to his country to carry the message that Doom doesn't tolerate interference from a corrupt and ill-functioning imperialist state.

Maybe find some way of sticking in that the scientist was working on biologically engineered corn designed to maximise nutrition and make Latveria better able to feed its people. I think stuff like, showing not only is he capable but he's doing things to make, his vision of, a better society. I guess you could then get a debrief involving Reed, the US consulting one of their best scientists because of his close historic association with Doom, which also gives you room for some backstory filing in.

I didn't think Ronan was great, mind you, but the fetal position shot actually fits what little character arc he has in the film--he's a little bit lost when the film opens since his crusade is about to be abandoned by his own people, he becomes Thanos' errand boy, he's rather single-minded and unimaginative and only really does his own thing once he decides to claim the gem for his own.  None of which makes him a good villain for driving a whole film, mind you, and it's a good example of how Marvel is just using the villains as plot mechanisms. But the opening shot isn't inconsistent with what the character is throughout--passive and easily manipulated until he gets a hold of the McGuffin.

Not really.  Reynolds and company were pushing this for years, and it was only the public adoration of the leaked footage that got the project finally greenlit.

And it will be the last time after Deadpool bombs.

They sucked shit because the writing, directing, acting, and special effects were all terrible. Bad movies are bad is about the only lesson you can take away from the prequels in regards to this discussion.

Maybe the distinction I'm trying to make here is that there's a difference between a good villain, and a good character. I think Doom could be a good character and not just a good villain. Going back to Star Wars as an example, Tarkin is a great villain, but he's barely a character. Angel Eyes in The Good the Bad and The Ugly, great villain but barely a character. Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men or Gary Oldman in the Professional. In most cases like that you're relying on a great actor to knock it out park and go beyond just what's on the page. The Joker in the Dark Knight epitomizes some of the worst tropes people have come to dislike in villains (damn near omnipotent in his planning, intentionally gets himself captured, etc...), but Heath Ledger's performance elevated the part. You could have other talented actors play those same roles with the same director and the same script and not have them come anywhere close to the original performance in the same way that if you had anyone else playing Han Solo regardless of how good an actor they were, the Star Wars movies probably wouldn't have worked nearly as well. Yes you could have a Doom who is a great villain with the barest characterization but at that point you're largely rolling the dice and hoping the actor turns in an award-worthy performance because there's very little to most of these characters otherwise.

And yes, I'm quite aware that you can build characterization through means other than detailing their backstory. I'm not sure that Ronan is a great example of it being done effectively though since I didn't hear lot of people praising GOTG because of Ronan.

And yet, what we can curse Joker for equally applies to Loki, who is every bit the same in villainy as the other Marvel Villains and yet has been made memorable by the merest backstory and the remarkable portrayal that Tom has put in.  So it's far to say that Heath made Joker what he was in the same way Tom did for Loki.

I don't have any objection to a Doom TV show. I'm just saying there's no reason he can't work in a movie. The reason he doesn't work in the FF movies is that they aren't good movies. The lesson there isn't "Doom doesn't work" it's "these movies are bad, with Doom being merely one example of that."

Khaldun you aren't wrong about Ronan, but what you are describing doesn't make for a good villain.

Edit: At least not in a movie where the villain is just a plot necessity / punching bag. Having a guy who starts off as a weak abandoned errand boy might make sense if he had a real character arc - maybe in that case he could be like Kefka from FF6. But I would argue that in GotG what little Nebula says and does is more interesting than anything about Ronan. Just the scene where she cuts off her own arm says more about the character than anything that happens with Ronan.

Not the biggest fan of the Thor movies, but I think Loki was fleshed out more in the first Thor than pretty much any other MCU villain before or since.  Not to take away from Tom's acting because he's pretty damn good, but there actually is a character there in the script with a backstory which provides clear motivations and an actual character arc.

Basically loki isn't a one dimensional villain, unlike every other villain in the mcu.

They do need to pay attention to what they did right with Loki, which is NOT make him like every other motiveless sniveller who just wants to take the throne instead of the noble prince. Instead they made him a) actually rather likeable; b) not necessarily evil at the beginning; c) conflicted about his own impulses; d) angry with his stepfather with increasing justification and e) arguably still trying to do 'the right thing' at the end in terms of killing Asgard's enemies while they're not really expecting it.

Which by the way is what Doom needs besides any of the other things (or none of them): you have to kind of like the guy. The best Doom story ever was the one where John Byrne played around with the idea that maybe, just maybe, Latveria is better off with Doom in charge compared to the alternatives. When Doom has a kind of grandeur and nobility that his fellow villains and enemies lack, he's almost, just almost, sympathetic. You can even almost, just almost, see why he hates Reed Richards, especially the more dangerous and ruthless Reed Richards of the last ten years or so of storytelling.

Otherwise there isn't a single villain so far in the Marvel canon that you really sympathize with even for a second--or respect as having his own motivations independent of being a plot driver. That's really what they need--a villain who has something they're genuinely trying to do for reasons that are comprehensible and human, if not sympathetic exactly.

Magneto?

Magneto would be more sympathetic if he wasn't just victim as torturer.  I know it happens in real life, but I just could never ever go for the whole 'We need to genocide them before they genocide us !' thing.

Yeah, his whole "do unto others as they did unto you" thing doesnt really make him very sympathetic.

To say a character is sympathetic isn't to say that you agree with them or their methods. Clearly you aren't supposed to be supportive of Magneto killing innocent people, but in First Class for instance there's a sympathetic and even likable character there up until his turn at the end.

Yes, but in First Class he's not the man he becomes and he's tracking and killing those directly responsible for a monstrous evil that you see on screen.  So it's ok.

But his later on 'let's just kill all the humies' is utterly retarded.

In terms of the comics though we see Magneto also trying the whole 'separate but equal' thing a few times and his attempts to basically separate off from humanity always end in tragedy and destruction as well.

Fair enough. Glotka did victim cycle better tho.

Glotka has something that I think almost no comic-book villains have, and that's self-loathing. Would help a lot with some of them. Intellectualized self-loathing is an especially fertile ground for evil deeds.

Interesting.

I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news ... but ... prepare yourself ... the sequel was pulled off the calendar.  You may cry now.

Tears of joy.

(http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/im_shocked.gif)

Thank heavens for that. Of course this has sent fans on Reddit into fitful spirals of, "OMG MABYE THIS  MEANZ A SPIDEY-LIKE DEAL!"

I wouldn't get hopes up on that quite yet. They're making money with X-men stuff, I'm sure that they think they can find the right formula for F4 in time.

Well, they won't. Stretchy guy and a girl who turns invisible just aren't fun.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1217291/Misc/Incredibles.png)

Fixed that for you.

I have a lot of faith that Marvel would make a great FF film.

People like pointing out the Incredibles and I generally agree but it's a totally different tone from the MCU, even comedy MCU movies like GoG and Ant-Man. Incredibles worked because of how much fun it was having them poke at the superhero tropes ("No Capes!") and worked the family story into that. Take away the comedy and it was a pretty meh movie about a guy having an affair because of his midlife crisis.

Fantastic Four still suck in any incarnation.

Stretchy guy is a problem. It is a bullshit power with no obvious limit. But I suspect it is managable with a half decent writer.

And I struggle to see why anyone thinks Marvel would break sweat making a superhero film about fire guy, rock guy, and invisible guy all of whom somehow have family issues.

The avengers movies are just this with more characters.

I don't think they should do this, because why bother giving anyone money for a mediocre genre template when they have more characters than they can use already. But they clearly could do it.

People are hyped for Marvel getting them back so they have Dr. Doom and the Silver Surfer in the portfolio, not for the Richards.

Somewhere along the line Dr. Doom became this awesome character everyone drools over instead of a bumbling despot regularly defeated by teenagers and co-dependent narcissists.

And squirrels, don't forget squirrels.

My guess if they really wanted Dr Doom they could do a Scarlet Witch.

Am I right in remembering his comic book origin has nothing to do with any F4 origin story?

Find it hard imagine a material number of people give a shit about Silver Surfer.

His comic origin has always been linked with Reed Richards, though in his original appearance, I don't think he acknowledged that he knew Richards.

I thought he was a brilliant young scientist who was in competition with Richaaaaaards!!!!! and turned to Latverian sorcery as a supplement to help outachieve him, ended up horribly disfiguring himself and getting a mask.

It was tangential but they were definitely meant to have had some relationship early on prior to going off and becoming superhero/villains.

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are both spelled out in the licensing contracts as being non-exclusive to Fox/Marvel.  Doom is not.  He is one of the characters exclusively under Fox control as long as they keep crapping on film.

However, my prediction remains unchanged: Deal announced in 2017, new FF movie right after the Infinity movies, and the rogues gallery of the FF is the most attractive part of the deal for Marvel. 

You can even see this in Marvel Heroes, the devs have confirmed that Richards is "by far" the least popular character.  You see Doom everywhere on the other hand.

To be fair, Richards is a pretty shitty powerset compared to Doom in MH. Remote missiles, Magic, Minions vs. "I turn into a beach ball!"

It's not just Doom and Surfer, a lot of the aliens are tied up in the FF rights.

I seriously doubt these contracts list names of characters.

And if they are demonstrably exclusively F4 stories, I doubt many people give a shit about them.

We know from the Quicksilver/Scarlet Witch stuff that they do to at least some extent.

Yeah, I'd be willing to bet the exact opposite.  Those contracts are probably incredibly specific as to what characters they have the rights to or don't.

This is the example that makes me assume they don't. I find it bizarre that individual characters like these two would have been negotiated into a non-exclusive pile back in the 90s, or that any characters would have been intentionally put in that state. The X-men deal was back when an independent Marvel had no intention of making their own movies.

That and the rumour that these contracts are why X-men and F4 comics no longer create new characters.

I could just about buy the idea that a list of specific headline characters are listed as exclusive (Wolverine, the F4 themselves, *possibly* Doom) and everything else is a free for all.

But they had every intention of licensing out as many properties as they could. In that respect it makes sense to be very clear about what characters are covered under each license so New Line wouldn't piss off Sony by trying to put Morbius in a Blade movie.

Edit: Although in actuality I think there was some confusion as to who had the Morbius rights so maybe you could be somewhat right.

FFS some people around here don't learn. "Oh, nobody will care about THAT, only geeks care". Everybody will care if it's done well, nobody gives a shit if it isn't. If you didn't learn your lesson with Guardians of the Galaxy, you'll never learn it and get stuck with confident prognostications about what people who aren't ANYBODY reading here will like or not like.

People have loved a film that has space wizards with laser swords fighting space nazis. Go back to 1975 and try to sell that one to people who know better and you'd get nothing but long cries of neeeeeeerrrrrrrd.

Nerd shit fails under two circumstances:

1) when a person embarrassed by it being nerd shit tries to mainstream it or do a grimdark whatever take so it isn't so nerdy
2) when it's played like every damn footnote in the history of the property matters, when the fan service is too heavy

Of the amount of money spent to adapt comics, SF books, etc., #1 is vastly vastly vastly the dominant error. And it's made by people who say, "Nobody normal could care about the Silver Surfer". They're too afraid of error #2. Error #2 is if you have no sense at all of how to make something have a good 'take' for people who don't care much about comics. Which hasn't happened that often. Especially in the MCU so far.

You're such an angry little man.

Rage on angry guy. Some day it'll matter.

No need to argue... they've said the contracts list the big names and establish rules for minor characters and new characters. First appearancesappearances of characters are a significant element in the way the general rules work. They said that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were amongst a small handful of characters that were left as nonexclusive because they played major roles in X lore and Avengers lore. They did anticipate the possibility of an Avengers movie and wanted to have the rights to do the stories with the Scarlet Witch, but Fox wanted to be able to have Magneto's children as well as an option.

Apparently, they aren't Magento's children anymore.

Except when they are, as was meant to be inferred in the recent First Class movie.  :awesome_for_real:

The ones listed are the ones that ARE exclusive. There are ones that fell through the cracks, so to speak, like Scarlet Witch/Quicksilver.

On FF, Skrulls are tied up in that, so you can't have an actual Skrull/Kree war stuff. It makes some of the background stuff of GoG a little ... humorous from a fan-perspective.

No, I mean in the comics they aren't Magneto's children. They've now been revealed to be experiments of the High Evolutionary with the Maximoff family actually being their real parents so not even really mutants in the Marvel sense - they are actually mutates (Marvel's made that distinction forever).