Over the course of a decade, Fox tried three times to get the
Fantastic Four franchise right and failed each time. The worst one came in 2015 courtesy of director Josh Trank and the movie's poor critical and commercial performance essentially put the final nail in the coffin of Marvel's First Family.
However, before Jeremy Slater and Simon Kinberg started working on the reboot's screenplay,
X-Men: First Class scribes Zack Stentz and Ashley Miller wrote a draft which has never seen the light of day. Now, though, the former has shed some light on what we could have ended up seeing.
"Josh Trank, who ended up doing the Fantastic Four that we saw in the theaters, we were supposed to be writing the script for him but nobody told him that we were doing it," Stentz reveals. "So, when he officially signed on he was like, 'Why are you imposing these other writers on me? I want to use my own writer. I wanna do my own script.' And he did his version instead."
Stentz added, "It was one of those hammer blows to our career at the time, even though we had gotten paid, because I was so freakin' proud of that script. It was how the Fantastic Four were almost the Fantastic Five except a young man named Victor von Doom was just too damaged and f---ed up to be part of them. It was a script I was very proud of. Josh Trank didn't wanna do it."
Honestly, that doesn't sound much better than the other versions of the team we saw on the big screen, and it's another screenplay that relied heavily on creating a relationship between the heroes and Doctor Doom. Still, without getting to read it, it's hard to say how it would compare to Trank's movie and the ones Tim Story helmed before it.
What do you guys think?
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characters you may not know are coming to the MCU!
Lyja
A Skrull with the ability to shapeshift into humans or animals, Lyja is unlikely to appear in next year's Captain Marvel due to the fact her origin is very much rooted within the world of the Fantastic Four. She managed to infiltrate the team by posing as Alica Masters and served as both an ally and enemy to the team. Assuming we see more of the Skrulls in the MCU, Lyja will no doubt get in on the action.