Fantastic Four/20th Century Fox

Fox's latest attempt at revitalising the Fantastic Four film franchise has flopped. It's not just performed poorly, it's looking like it could leave the movie studio to take a whopping loss on the production.

To make matters worse, fan-favourite writer Max Landis has shared a glimpse at his rejected script for the movie, which in four pages shows a better grasp of the characters than the entirety of the new film.


The cinematic reboot has grossed only $59.8m globally (£38.4m) -- one of the lowest openings for a superhero movie ever, and the worst since 2012's Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. The difference? Nicolas Cage's ill-thought demon biker sequel only cost $57m to begin with; "Fant4stic's" budget was a significantly pricier $120m (£77m), before marketing and distribution costs.

The reception for the film is so bad that it could leave Fox to write off a $60m (£38.5) loss on the project, even without marketing costs allowed for. Industry site The Hollywood Reporter quotes Barton Crockett, a movie industry financial analyst, as saying that the movie amounts to "a negative start to Fox's already cautious forecast for a $200m year-over-year decline in studio segment profits in fiscal year 2016."

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Translation: Fox already warned that they were expecting losses for the year, and Fantastic Four bombing has made things drastically worse. The film is unexpected to even cover its costs and break even, let alone approach even dollar one of profit.

The film has been so unpopular with critics and cinema goers that it currently holds a ghastly nine percent "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the lowest ever CinemaScore rating for a blockbuster superhero movie -- even the universally hated Catwoman holds a B ranking compared to F4's C-. Director Josh Trank, whose reportedly poor behaviour on-set also impacted the movie's reputation on the run-up to release, officially washed his hands of the film the day before its premiere, tweeting (then deleting, but not before it was screencapped) a micro-rant, saying "a year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would've received great reviews. You'll probably never see it. That's reality though."

Then, last night Max Landis -- who wrote Chronicle, Trank's last major release -- tweeted out the first few pages of his rejected Fantastic Four script. Written four years ago, it's a very different beast to what ended up on screen, irrespective of Trank's claims of studio interference.


In Landis' take, the team is already formed, and on the run from a black ops squad. The opening scene, with a raid on a hidden base housing the Fantastic Four, plays heavily into the weird science nature of Reed Richards' experiments -- comics fans know his real superpower is incredible genius, with stretching and elasticity rarely used. The banter between the team is spot on too. The Fantastic Four is a family first and foremost, prone to digs and injokes at each other, and Landis has the voice for each character down perfectly.

While there's every chance it could flash back to the team's origin, it's refreshing that Landis' script also seems to trust that the audience knows the basics of the characters and just gets things rolling. One of the biggest criticisms of the existing film is that it feels like a 100 minute trailer for a movie that never actually arrives.

Even if Fox is left with its $60m bar tab for the film, don't expect fan favourite Marvel Studios to regain the rights to the First Family of the Marvel Universe anytime soon. The terms of Fox's big screen rights to the characters are such that it has seven years to exercise its options and get a movie into cinemas. Short of the studio deciding to wash their hands of the characters and sell back to Marvel, 2022 is the earliest that the rights would revert automatically, and even then only if another reboot isn't announced.