Fantastic Four (Man of Steel Edition) (2015)

[Khaldun]

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.

[Evildrider]

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[jgsugden]

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

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. 

[DraconianOne]

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

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

[Velorath]

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.

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[jgsugden]

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

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

You're making baby Jesus cry.

[Sir T]

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 

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

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.

[jgsugden]

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

[sickrubik]

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

I think I was right. Fantastic Four just suck.

[SurfD]

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.

[jgsugden]

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.

[Threash]

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

[Margalis]

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. 

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[HaemishM]

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

[jgsugden]

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. 

[Sir T]

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).

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.

[Velorath]

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. 

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.

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.

[Khaldun]

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.)

[Ironwood]

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.   

[Khaldun]

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.

[HaemishM]

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

[jgsugden]

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...

[HaemishM]

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.

[Ironwood]

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.

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 ?

[Khaldun]

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.

[jgsugden]

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.

[Ironwood]

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

[Sir T]

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!!!"