Fox's next big superhero flick is coming to theaters next year... so why hasn't Fox released so much as a movie poster?

Fox had a pretty damn good Summer, especially if you're talking about superhero movies. With X-Men: Days of Future Past they've handily established themselves as the only game in town who can open a comic book movie to huge box office, audience enthusiasm and good reviews not named Christopher Nolan or Marvel Studios. And that's after weathering two movies everyone hated, a movie people mostly liked but didn't exactly pack theaters to see, a movie people went to see but forgot about a week later, and a pretty serious-sounding legal scandal.

Now, imagine you're Fox, and you just made all the money off a Marvel-based team-superhero movie. If you had another movie in that same genre that had finished shooting, was in post-production, was the big-budget debut of the director of a cult-fave superhero flick and was coming out before X-Men: DOFP's sequel is even halfway through shooting. You'd probably want people to know about it, right?

You'd probably at least have one of those logo-only early posters. Maybe even a brief teaser cobbled together from whatever footage you had. Pop out a still or two of the actors standing around, perhaps? "Leak" some snaps of random actors setting up in front of a green screen to one of the traffic-thirsty lower-tier nerd blogs who'll run anything? "Look the other way" when your more social media-addicted stars Instagrams a prop? If absolutely nothing else, you'd surely show up at Comic-Con and pitch the film to a rabid, eager-to-be-pleased fanboy crowd that won't mind a "trailer" of unfinished FX and animatics, wouldn't you?

Of course you would. Who wouldn't? By even the most tortured pretzel-logic of the least gifted C-student MBA with a cherry executive gig by the most nepotistic of uncles knows that nobody buys a ticket for a movie nobody told them about.

So why isn't Fox telling anyone about Josh Trank's Fantastic Four?

In case you hadn't heard, that movie finished shooting a while back. And unlike some other studios, it can be safely assumed that most of the important non-CGI work is in the can, ready for assembly and a final polish. But there was barely any publicity -- certainly not the kind we're accustomed to in an era where a dutched-angle snap of Paul Rudd dressed like Colin Farrell on his day off qualifies as a "reveal"and even infamously-secretive J.J. Abrams has been drip-feeding the press Star Wars - Episode VII hints at a pace that qualifies as a torrent -- for J.J. Abrams.