It is tempting to wonder if there has ever been a superhero team more mishandled on the big screen than the Fantastic Four. On the face of it, Marvel’s awesome foursome are less frumpy and passé than Captain America, more recognisable to the general public than … say … Deadpool, and have a collective backstory that’s almost as absurdly cosmic as the Guardians of the Galaxy. Yet somehow all of the above are thriving in multiplexes, while Reed Richards and co are an enduring Hollywood disappointment.

If blame is to be laid anywhere, it should probably be placed at the door of 20th Century Fox, the studio that bought the big screen rights to Fantastic Four way back in the 1990s, and has held onto them ever since despite all available evidence suggesting that it hasn’t got a clue what to do with the superhero team. In fact, the history of the franchise points to one knee-jerk decision after another, a pattern that shows no sign of letting up if rumours that the latest reboot are to be believed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Fantastic Four from 1994, with Michael Bailey Smith, Rebecca Staab, Alex Hyde-White and Jay Underwood. Photograph: Allstar/New Horizons/Sportsphoto

Bleeding Cool has reported that the new version of Fantastic Four will be a kid-centric movie similar in tone to Pixar’s The Incredibles, and focused on Franklin and Valeria, the children of Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic) and Susan Storm. The other two members of the Four, Johnny Storm (The Human Torch) and Ben Grimm (The Thing), will be featured but not in central roles. The blog’s latest suggestion is that the new project might be based on Mark Millar’s unpublished Kindergarten Heroes comic, about a gang of toddler superheroes, which Fox optioned in 2013.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with identifying a market for comic book stories aimed at the very young. We live in an era in which parents taking their kids to see a movie about Captain America and Iron Man are likely to have to shield their little ones’ peepers during the excruciating scene where a helpless, tied-up baddie is slowly, horrifically drowned, or the denouement in which our heroes cheerfully beat each other to bloody wrecks. Meanwhile, The Lego Batman Movie, The Incredibles and Big Hero 6 have proven that there is a place for meta-tastic animated superhero flicks that appeal to all ages.

The problem here is not the idea of Kindergarten Heroes coming to the big screen, it’s that Fox reportedly want to bundle up its rights to Fantastic Four as part of the package. Apart from being contemptuous of Marvel’s longest running superhero team, the idea of focusing a movie on their offspring – even if a tale centred on the preposterously powerful Franklin Richards is tantalising – ignores the fact that the studio has yet to get the original quartet right on the big screen.



The duo of noughties movies – Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer – which starred Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards and Jessica Alba as Sue Storm, are best remembered for their TV-movie quality and the dull interplay between its four main heroes. Perhaps Fox decided those films’ failure to pick up critical traction resulted from the safety-first approach adopted by director Tim Story, because it then appointed up-and-coming film-maker Josh Trank (Chronicle) to oversee a dark and gritty reboot. Unfortunately, the result, 2015’s Fantastic Four (also known as Fant4stic) is now remembered as one of the most infamous box office turkeys of the decade, with Trank even disowning the film prior to its opening.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fantastic Four 2015, with Kate Mara and Michael B Jordan Photograph: Ben Rothstein/AP

In the wake of this repeated maladministration, there is only one obvious way forward for the Fantastic Four to establish their rightful place among the highest plinths of the big screen comic book pantheon, and that is for the quartet to be absorbed into the Marvel Cinematic Universe – a route that has just seen Spider-Man return to prominence after the relative mediocrity of the wallcrawler’s last few Sony movies.

The parallels are obvious: audiences would no more pay to see another film in which the Fantastic Four gain mysterious powers after a trip into space than they would have parted with their hard-earned cash for yet another Spidey origin story featuring the death of Uncle Ben and Peter Parker beating up Flash Thompson. Bringing the webslinger into the MCU avoided the need to bore us with a slightly shifted version of the same old origins story, and it’s not hard to imagine a similar trick working for Richards and team.

Instead, Fox seem determined to go an entirely different route, one that would conveniently allow the studio to keep full control of the property it bought the rights to all those years ago. Yet the concept goes against all received thinking in this arena, which is that spin-offs work best when the original property being bounced off is so popular that there is genuine demand for more stories set in the same universe. The Fantastic Four certainly doesn’t fall into this category. In Hollywood terms, it’s as if someone decided to make a spin-off to Mother’s Day centred on the character played by Julia Roberts.

By skipping a generation, Fox would essentially be giving up on ever making the definitive Fantastic Four movie that fans have been waiting for since Roger Corman’s execrable low-budget 90s effort. Evidence suggests this will really not be a Fantastic Four film, but rather a movie tagged to the Fantastic Four brand for commercial reasons. And that, surely, will represent the studio finally admitting that it simply does not know what to do with these storied comic book titans.