RETROCRUSH

Lost in the (potentially awesome) news that Disney is going to acquire Marvel is an announcement that Fox plans to wipe away the first two Fantastic Four films and start over with something new. This is pretty good news, considering the original two movies were critical disasters and had a cheezy quality that really didn’t measure up to the Spider-Man, Iron Man, and even X-Men franchises that have done so well.

Variety writer Michael Fleming reports that Akiva Goldsman has been hired to produce the film who won an Oscar for writing A Beautiful Mind, but also shit out a script for Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, so that doesn’t give me very high hopes. Michael Green, who writes for Heroes and the canceled Kings is on board as writer. This is not a team that inspires confidence. Fox has offered no other information on their plans for the franchise.

I think the only way for a FF movie to truly succeed is to treat is as an over the top anything goes SCI-FI explosion. You can’t have angst, revenge, and traditional super-heroics with this. The original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby books worked so well because they were a mind-blowing galaxy spanning set of adventures that threw all the rules out the door. Frankly, an animated CGI film in a Kirby style  is probably the best way to treat this.

But whatever they end up doing, it’s going to be hard to make Fantastic Four films worst than the first two.

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