Instead of getting Max Landis' Fantastic Four plans 140-characters at a time via Twitter, The Daily Beast caught up with Max Landis for lunch. Here's what the outspoken screenwriter shared about his plans for the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom in particular.
"I had Doctor Doom as a good guy, one of Reed’s college friends, and my whole movie he’s trying to find and help them but it wasn’t clear if he was good or bad—until the finale of the movie when you realize his connection to Reed, and that they’re best friends. The audience who knows Doctor Doom thinks he’s going to turn bad, but the movie ends with him saving them. And in the sequel he’s probably good, too. You know, you Sam Raimi-Spider-Man it—at the end of the sequel he gets all [frick]ed up and shows up in the Doctor Doom armor. But then in the third movie he’s like, ‘What have you done to me?’”
While Landis may have had Doom and Mister Fantastic as best-friends in his script, what about his real life relationship with Chronicle director Josh Trank. The timing of his Twitter tirade on the Fox/Trank Fantastic Four situation made it seem as if Landis was attempting to mount a defense for his former Chronicle colleague. But it seems as if they're not the best of friends.
"I actually feel bad about [the timing of posting those script pages on Twitter] because I’d always intended to post them that day, but I was not aware of what was going to be happening with that movie at that time. It was kind of thoughtless of me in hindsight. We weren’t close before. We were sort of frenemies in high school. He’s a very intense personality, and I think he’s a very good director. But in this business—and I know this better than anyone—having an intense personality is a double-edged sword. It wasn’t fun to see all of that happen to him, because who knows what happened there?”
Speaking of Chronicle, at one point in time, there was talk of a sequel. Then the story was that Landis would be coming back but not Trank. The project continued to (d)evolve into a sequel where none of the original cast or creative team would be back either. If anything, it would appear that Fox's mishandling of the property that gave Landis his rise to prominence is the burr under his saddle.
"I don’t want to sh*t-talk Fox but it really became clear that Chronicle is not a movie they would have made if they knew what they were making. So when I wrote the sequel to that movie, they said, ‘This is dark. Where is the aspirational fun stuff? This is a dark dramatic thriller about superheroes that’s found footage. No one’s going to want to see this.’"
Landis goes on to describe not one but two outlines he developed for a Chronicle sequel. One which undoes the death of Michael B. Jordan and Dane DeHaan's characters so that the original threesome reunite for a grand adventure. Then there's his second idea, which introduces a villain(ess) who faces off against Matt (Alex Russell), the lone survivor of Chronicle.
"It’s one of my better scripts. It’s very dark. It’s not Chronicle. It has a much happier ending than Chronicle!"
There's a lot more from Trank over at The Daily Beast. Like him or hate him, Landis is definitely an interesting person.
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