Fantastic Four is one of the biggest critical and commerical failures in recent memory, while the behind the scenes chaos which led to that is one of the most interesting stories to come out of Hollywood for years (especially when it was revealed that one of the cast members very nearly came to blows with director Josh Trank). Now, during a recent podcast appearance to promote X-Men: Apocalypse, writer and producer Simon Kinberg opened up on where he believes they may have gone wrong with it.
"I don’t think that there is, in any movie that doesn’t work, a single decision that is the reason that that movie doesn’t work," he explained. "I think that there were many decisions we made along the way that led to a movie that people didn’t like and to a movie that I would do differently next time. I think the biggest takeaway for me the tone of the movie, while really interesting and ambitious, ran counter to the DNA of the source material. I think the source material of Fantastic Four is bright, optimistic, poppy in tone. There’s a sort of plucky spirit to those characters, and we made a darker, sort of body-horror kind of version of Fantastic Four, which again as I say it now sounds really interesting and cerebrally ambitious, but isn’t necessarily Fantastic Four."
That's an interesting perspective, but it's hard to say whether or not he's right, especially as the first two Fantastic Four movies adopted that tone and ended up still being terrible. Could it be that these characters just don't work in live-action? Either way, Fox isn't giving up. "It’s a big part of [Fox’s superhero] plan going forward.… I would love to continue making movies with that cast." We know that isn't going to happen, so a reboot somewhere down the line is probably the most likely option.