Marvel Studios' upcoming Fantastic Four movie recently lost director Jon Watts, and while we've yet to learn who'll be taking the helm in his place, we do have an intriguing update on the planned reboot courtesy of Moon Knight head writer Jeremy Slater.
While chatting to ComicBook.com, Slater revealed that the Disney+ show's producers, Grant Curtis and Nick Pepin, are also "running" Fantastic Four.
“My execs on Moon Knight are the same guys who are running Fantastic Four, so we had a lot of talks about it,” Slater tells the site. “Grant and Nick are amazing executives. They’re going to find brilliant writers and brilliant directors. And they don’t need my stink anywhere near that project.”
It sounds like Curtis and Pepin have been tasked with assigning a new creative team to the film. The former has previously produced several Sam Raimi features, including his Spider-Man trilogy. Pepin, meanwhile, has been working on MCU projects ever since he broke in as a production assistant on Captain America: Civil War in 2016.
Slater actually penned the first draft of Josh Trank's F4ntastic, and is often asked if he'd lobbied or been approached to work on the next feature outing for Marvel's First Family.
"I don't think the original Fantastic Four was my fault per se, because I have one line of dialogue in that movie when Reed is about to do his science experiment as a kid, and he's like, 'Don't blow up,' I think that's the one line that held over from my script and everything else was changed," he adds. "So I don't take a lot of ownership over it, but I also know the optics of if they announce, 'Hey, we're doing a Fantastic Four movie,' All of Twitter goes 'Yay,' and they're like, 'And the guy that wrote the last one's doing it again,' and all of Twitter goes, 'You idiots!'
Spoilers for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness follow.
We still know very little about Marvel Studios' plans for the FF, but John Krasinski did appear as Reed Richards in the Doctor Strange sequel. The character met his end at the hands of the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), but the A Quiet Place star/director is expected to reprise the role for the upcoming reboot.