Fantastic Four Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Most comic book fans agree that if there was one really solid thing about the two Fantastic Four films, it was Chris Evans. He was the perfect Johnny Storm! It's a shame when a superhero franchise fails its good performers, and reboots them right out of the picture. I had a chance to ask Evans what he thought about the Fantastic Four reboot, and not only was he gracious enough to answer, he wishes the new franchise nothing but good luck.

"I don't think I'm going to be involved in it. I would imagine a reboot would be -- a reboot! I think they're going to start from scratch and that's the way those movies go. I mean, they're doing it with Red Dawn too. Sometimes they happen quicker than others. Batman there was a big chunk of time, and the new Batman movies are fantastic. Superman, Incredible Hulk. Sometimes its a big gap, sometimes there's a small gap. If there's room to reinvent a franchise in a different tone and they can make a good film out of it, so be it. I'm not going to have anything negative to say about it."

Would it feel weird to watch someone else play the Human Torch? "Well, of course. But I've done plays and then I'll go see someone else do the same play, and be like 'Hmm. I did it differently!' You know? [laughs] Of course. But let's not confuse weird with bad, or weird with negative. Weird is in no way [negative]. No way would I have any -- I welcome the new franchise. I hope it's fantastic. I like good movies! I'm sure Michael Keaton felt the same way, I'm sure Christopher Reeve felt the same way. If it's a great movie, let's make it. Let's get it out there. There aren't enough of them."

This is why it does pay to keep track of whispers and rumors on our great Internet. Back in March, IESB.net reported that Fox was toying with the idea of a Fantastic Four reboot. I thought it was too soon, many of you did too, although the general consensus seemed to be that we'd all like them to return after a bit of a breather.

Well, we're getting the reboot, and probably in very short order. Variety reports that Fox has hired producer Akiva Goldsman to oversee the project, and brought on Heroes alumni (and co-writer of Warner Bros' The Green Lantern) Michael Green to pen a screenplay. Fox wouldn't comment on the project further, but Variety notes that the studio owns the Fantastic Four in perpetuity, and that they're still keen on making a Silver Surfer movie. Last we heard, J. Michael Straczynski's script was in the dead zone, but given what all is being resurrected at Fox, perhaps there's still hope for it.

So, it begins again. Prepare for a year or two of Fantastic Four casting and script rumors (feel free to start your own in the comments), and resign yourself to the fact that the Disney-Marvel behemoth will never, ever get the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, or any of the X-Men characters away from 20th Century Fox.

The Avengers' mighty writer Zak Penn gave a nifty little update on all things Marvel yesterday, and it completely slipped past my radar. Better late than never though, right?

SciFi Wire caught up with Penn right as he was on the verge of another Marvel meeting. With Iron Man 2 well underway, they're beginning to knit together the continuity and overlap the plotlines: "I'm taking a meeting next week with the Thor and Captain America people, and we are all going to get together, and I will see what is going to happen. I'll see where they are leaving the characters; it's pretty complicated. ... There's a board that is tracking what is happening. [We'll see] how this movie overlaps in that movie ... Marvel is autonomous now. It is night and day: Everyone has read every comic. They know how to make a cool movie." (Low wages or not, wouldn't you just love to work for Marvel?)

Every compliment Penn has for Marvel is a backhanded slap to his old parent studio, Fox. He revealed that he was frustrated while writing X-Men and X2 because he was dying to do a crossover, and bring in the Fantastic Four.
"They're doing Captain American and Thor first, and then Avengers is coming out," Penn said. "They want to see that they're all connected, not like the Fantastic Four can't come into the X-Men world, like I was told ... It is a world of difference [at Marvel]; it is a lot easier to do things like that, and they encourage it." Here I'll leave off so you can weep at the missed opportunities, and wish we lived in an Ultimate Universe where Marvel still owned their entire stable of heroes.

Hollywood's favorite new word is "reboot." I'm not sure why it's preferable to "remake" except that it has a technological ring to it, and implies that our movie memories will be erased as easily as our computer hard drives.

Comic book franchises is where the "rebooting" really seems to be happening (which is no surprise, considering the "retcon" was invented by comic books), with the Hulk undergoing the first treatment, Superman confirmed to be next, and Daredevil in rumor stage.

According to IESB.net, Fox is now looking to give the Fantastic Four the reboot. They want a whole new cast , and a whole new approach, specifically one that's a little more edgy. They want less bubble gum and more Iron Man. Of course, it's all rumor at this point, but the rumors proved true when it came to Superman and Daredevil, so I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if we get an official announcement.

I guess the biggest question is ... should they? I'm still in favor of redoing Daredevil, but now the rush to remake history is feeling rather ridiculous. Rise of the Silver Surfer just came out in 2007, might it not be better to let the foursome rest awhile, and see what fans start clamoring for? (I seem to remember they want the Silver Surfer, not more of the Four.)

Then again, if a version isn't popular or definitive (does anyone really think Reed Richards and immediately picture Ioan Gruffudd?) does it really matter if you change the line-up so soon? But why this "reboot" drama? Why not just ease back into the series with a new cast and a new story arc, and simply pretend it's the same comic book with a new artist?

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You have to feel bad for the Silver Surfer. Everyone else is getting their own spin-off and franchise, and he can't even get the green-light. J. Michael Straczynski already said that his script was dead, but rumors continued to swirl that Alex Proyas was attached to direct.

But as reported by Slashfilm, Proyas shot that down at ComicCon. He didn't even know where the rumor originated. And while he's very fond of the character, he told MTV this week that he will never even consider directing a Silver Surfer movie. Why? "Because it's a Fox picture. And I'm determined never to work with them ever again because of my experience on I,Robot." Nor is he happy with the way the character was handled in Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer. "It's like the origin of Silver Surfer was in that movie, and I'm going, 'This is such a f–king great story, why throw it away? I think they messed it up ... Silver Surfer would have been something I would have loved to have done. He's one of the last cool ones left, really."

Who knows -- maybe Fox will relinquish the rights to the Fantastic Four characters (it's not like they're using them), and Proyas will not only get to direct a comic book movie, but fans will get a Silver Surfer movie from someone who really gets the character. But with all the studios jealously guarding their franchises, we'll probably see a Fantastic Four reboot before we see the Silver Surfer in the hands of someone that cares.

OK, correct me if I am wrong here, but did anyone really enjoy the last two Fantastic Four movies so much that a third installment is really necessary? I guess when the last film raked in $131,921,738, Fox figured they might as well take another shot. IESB recently got the chance to speak with Ms. Invisible herself, Jessica Alba, about the possibility of a third film. For those of us out there who thought the first two were a waste of time and celluloid, don't worry, it looks like we might have the writer's strike to thank for a delay. Alba tells IESB, "I know the writers strike and the impending actors strike has kind of put a wrench in everything production wise. That film takes a lot of prep, a good six months of prep and about six months to shoot. With the strike, I think, maybe it's put on hold."

The first two films were directed by Tim Story, who is currently working on the feel-good sports movie, Patriots, with Forrest Whitaker. So, if a Fantastic sequel is delayed, there is still plenty of time to get Story back at the helm for a third film. News of a third Fantastic film first surfaced back in June; however, while most reports pointed towards a reunion with the Silver Surfer, Alba made no mention of it in her interview with IESB. As for the rest of the cast, Ioan Gruffudd (Mr. Fantastic), Michael Chiklis (The Thing), and Chris Evans (Human Torch), I can only assume they would all be on board for another film. As long as there is some "gold in these hills," it looks like Fox is going to milk the quartet for all they are worth.

A conversation arose in the screening room the other day about the sorry state of young, romantic performers in movies today and the overwhelming blandness slathered across our movie screens. Pretty, plastic, chiseled faces smile at one another and sometimes kiss, and their efforts leave everyone cold. Critics and audiences often use the word "chemistry" to describe these encounters; either the characters have it or they don't. Strangely, there's really no way to tell if it's even there until the movie is finished. You can put two actors in a room together, or screen test them, but none of it comes together until the audience becomes a factor.

One reason most movie couples have been so bland lately is the ever-increasing control that studios are demanding of their product. Every aspect of filmmaking must be regulated and stabilized, and so, to make the most of their romantic stories, these same studio people very simply cast the most beautiful actors they can find. Beautiful people sometimes explode on the movie screen with lots of personality and star power, but just as often, they don't, looking more like polished statues without so much as a heartbeat. James Dean was very handsome, but he had a surprising element, a kind of unpredictability, as well as world-heavy sadness. But James Franco, who played Dean in a TV biopic, has only the looks. As shown in his most recent film, Spider-Man 3 (151 screens), where there should be passion and danger and excitement, there's only grooming. At times I honestly can't tell the difference between him and Paul Walker.

During Thursday's Comic-Con International in San Diego, I sat in on a pretty interesting panel comprised of some of the most talented and successful screenwriters, comic book writers and producers working in the business today. The panel was called Adapting Comics for the Screen and the list of people offering opinions and insight were the perfect group to be asking about this topic.

On the panel were Mark Verheiden, Kevin Feige, Mark Fergus, Don Payne and the legendary Stan "The Man" Lee who even at his age, was just as sharp, funny and charming as he could be and shows no signs of slowing down. As a writer myself, I was particularly interested in this panel of experts and how they have taken comics and translated them for the big screen.

First off each of the panel was introduced by moderator Jeff Goldsmith of Creative Screenwriting magazine and as he read the list of the assembled people's credits, films like Iron Man, Children of Men, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Battlestar Galactica and most of the major characters of the Marvel Universe, I grew even more interested to hear what these very accomplished men had to say.

In this day and age you can do anything with special effects. But can you do it well? I believe that you can, but Hollywood doesn't seem to be in agreement with my belief. Studios continue to put out movies with special effects that disappoint, and I think it is disrespectful to audiences. Either figure it out, or leave it out. Every time I see a bad effect in a movie, I know it could have been done better, or more imaginatively, and it frustrates the heck out of me. The worst is when I see a bad effect in a movie with mostly great effects, such as in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

A visual effect doesn't have to be great or even realistic as long as it works with the story and is believable -- I'll take Harryhausen or Henson over most of the CGI attempts lately. Unfortunately, Hollywood seems to half-heartedly strive for greatness and realism with every movie, and more often than not it fails to achieve either. In my thirty years I've seen some terrible visual effects, some only terrible in retrospect, some only terrible in perspective with what else has been done. I'm not usually surprised by bad effects, though, because I've developed a cynicism about effects, particularly about CGI, that causes me to expect the worst. Nonetheless, I've picked seven movies that did actually surprise me -- a lot.

1. King Kong (2005)

In The Return of the King, Peter Jackson has some bad effects shots, but at least they're just shots. In his next film, King Kong, he has bad effects sequences. And as with The Return of the King, they are all the more apparent and all the more frustrating because there are actually some great effects shots and sequences in King Kong (it did deserve the Oscar). The worst example in Kong is the dinosaur stampede. At first the sequence is tolerable because the dinos are rendered beautifully and the weak green-screen compositing is not any worse than what many of us grew up with. But as the sequence progresses, the interaction between the actors and the computer-generated dinos looks too fake, too much like something made long ago, before computers were even used. Both the part on the cliff and the part where the animals fall over each other are sloppy and unacceptable. It is a completely ironic sequence, too, since it begins with an exchange about movies looking real. At least someone thought to score the thing sped up with "Yakkety Sax" or it wouldn't be completely useless.

Over on Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikki Finke has a piece up about the anticipated weekend box office for Transformers that pretty much sums up why Hollywood's summer blockbusters (with some exceptions scattered here and there) tend to be so darn bad: because no matter how bad they are, and no matter how many critics write scathing reviews warning people how bad they are, audiences still flock to see them.

Transformers is a case in point: Finke notes that pretty much everyone on the planet expects the film to gross $125 million this weekend -- now stop a moment and ponder how many butts you have to put in seats to gross $125 million -- except for Paramount, which, according to Finke has back-pedaled to predicting a mere $100-125 million take.

That's a whole lot of moolah for a film about robots that disguise themselves as cars. To be fair, in spite of the fact that Cinematical's James Rocchi and Scott Weinberg thought the film was utterly wretched, it is sitting relatively pretty with a 60% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes (a surprising 69% from the Cream of the Crop), which isn't going to hurt the film's box office any, especially for those folks who are inclined to actually take a look at what critics are saying about a film before plunking down their cash for a $10 movie ticket and some snacks.