What’s So Hard About Making a Fantastic Four Movie?

The impending release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the fourth attempt to bring Marvel Comics’ “First Family” to the silver screen, is the kind of thing that makes one stop and think about the entire blockbuster superhero movie era. Surely, the heads over at Marvel and Disney think, this must be something to bring the aimless Marvel Cinematic Universe back into step. For has there ever been a more comic booky comic book than The Fantastic Four? More grandiose villains than Doctor Doom or Galactus? “If we can just crack the code on this,” they must be thinking, “we can adapt anything!”

Yet First Steps is angling to be the first one of these attempts with any staying power. The reasons why a successful adaptation have eluded these characters range from the totally banal (Hollywood being Hollywood) to the foundational (comic books being comic books). And, because they’ve been going on now since the Clinton administration, they represent several distinct moments in the last 30 years of superhero film adaptations, from their early stumbles and low-budget embarrassments to their current, load-bearing place as tentpole franchises. Truly, the Fantastic Four adaptations of yesteryear are the flops that tell us all we need to know about why other films have been such successes.

We must first consider what exactly Hollywood filmmakers are given to work with when they adapt the Fantastic Four. What is so difficult about this one stable of characters?

The Fantastic Four can’t claim to be the unquestioned weirdest comic from Marvel’s vast stable, but consider a few facts. Their villains include Doctor Doom, a sorcerer scientist who has become the beloved dictator of a small country—he is Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic’s chief rival in all things. Doctor Doom does not speak his lines, he pronounces them from atop thrones, or through his endless army of robots. Doctor Doom haughtily refers to himself in the third person without even a shred of irony.

So right off the bat, your straight-laced father figure (who is a celebrity superhero scientist and married to a cover-girl-beautiful woman who is also a superhero scientist) is also opposed by the most heedlessly evil villain imaginable. There is so much going on there, and so little room for subtlety, that the average Hollywood screenwriter (prior to about 2012) clearly just didn’t know what to do with any of this. They were used to movies doing things like establishing their premises or trying to convey internal conflict.

In the innocent days of the early ’90s, when comic book movies were still trying to chase the success of Superman and Batman, and when Marvel Comics was going through a rough patch that would lead to a major upheaval in the comics industry, it’s hard to believe anybody anywhere could have taken the idea of a Fantastic Four adaptation seriously. And, as it turns out, nobody at the studios did!

The lost 1994 version of The Fantastic Four was a film produced by Roger Corman, made for around $1 million, and ultimately shelved for reasons nobody involved will officially admit to. In the documentary Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four, the cast and crew of this low-budget movie surmise that the rights-holders to the Fantastic Four intellectual property needed to prove they were trying to make a movie in order to extend those rights, and then simply wrote off the inevitably terrible result as a studio loss. It’s genuinely deflating to hear the actors’ and producers’ side of the story, who all insist they were enthusiastically trying to do the very best they could to actually make a real comic book movie on the most shoestring of budgets.

And here is the thing about The Fantastic Four (1994)–it’s actually not that bad. The Thing’s costume is astoundingly practical, with effective motorized facial expressions. The character Alicia—blind girlfriend of Ben Grimm who frequently figures into FF plots—is present. The four team members all have their actual powers, look like and are dressed like their actual characters, and have the same personalities as those characters. And, most importantly, the movie’s Doctor Doom is actually Doctor Doom, at least in appearance and villainous bombast. Copies of the movie have all degraded, and it is by no means a “good” movie, on its insulting budget. But it’s still more earnest than any other attempt leading up to First Steps. And this is probably the most important thing missing from everything that’s so far come since.

The biggest things that happened (as far as superhero films) between 1994 and 2005 were the successful trifecta of Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man—Marvel movies that actually performed extremely well at the box office and each kicked off lucrative franchises. But consider how most of them achieved this: Blade did very little to play up its comic book roots, leaning fully into the Gothic punk aesthetic and going more for pure action. X-Men looks extremely subdued by today’s standards, with its all-black costumes and sometimes a reluctance to delve too deeply into the origins of this or that character—as if the filmmakers are careful not to allow their comic book movie to get too comic booky.

The exception to those, though, was 2002’s Spider-Man, with its heartbreakingly earnest hero and director Sam Raimi’s total comfort with directing campy action. More than anything, it feels as if the creators of 2005’s Fantastic Four saw Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films and came away with the lesson that these things work when you make the villains intimately entangled with the heroes and make sure the costumes look right. (This is the wrong lesson.)

The result was a mid-2000s Fantastic Four movie that did decently enough at the box office but got dragged through the briar patch by critics, and it’s easy to see why. The acting isn’t great; the effects haven’t aged as well as other movies from the period; the jokes don’t land. The Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba in this continuity) accidentally ends up naked in both of the movies, of course, it being the ’00s. And Doctor Doom is just a snobby scientist who is obsessed with Sue Storm and hates Reed Richards—his powers are not Being A Cruel Dictator or Having An Army of Robots or Being A Sorcerer, but some vague lightning powers and having skin that kinda-sorta turns to metal. Beating him involves the Fantastic Four just zapping him with their powers a bunch.

The 2007 sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer, was received even less charitably. Its box office take was pretty tepid, and though it sought to adapt a foundational FF storyline, it completely left behind some of the most important parts of it, including, you know, Galactus. For those not in the know, Galactus is a gigantic, anthropomorphic devourer of worlds, a cosmic threat beyond the ken of mortals. He also has a big stupid headpiece thing—you’ll have to trust me that this is core to Galactus’ character. It is, of course, stupid in the way that comic books usually are—a fun and invigorating kind of stupid. Galactus having a big dumb headpiece thing, or even being a speaking entity, was apparently too much fun for 20th Century Studios, and they instead made Galactus a formless cloud. It was one among many decisions that just didn’t respect the source material. The film did poorly enough (or perhaps the X-Men movies did well enough by comparison) that the rightsholders at Fox put the franchise in mothballs.

Once again, fortunes shifted in the superhero movie game between one FF movie and the next. Rise of the Silver Surfer came out one year before Marvel’s triumphant return as master of its own intellectual property with Iron Man, and by 2015, they had been bought by Disney and were on their way to building up to the Avengers mega-event that was 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. All of this had been achieved with characters whose adaptation rights Marvel had not managed to sell off back in the ’90s because, to be frank, nobody cared about them at the time. Suddenly Captain America—the guys whose name is “Captain The County I Am From”—was a beloved cinematic fan favorite. It must have made somebody, somewhere, angry about their own underperforming Marvel IP.

And thus Fant4stic, whose title I refuse to style any other way, was born. Paste’s own Jim Vorel gave it a withering assessment 10 years ago, and he’s right. The movie is utterly bizarre, confused about itself, bafflingly plotted, uncharismatic and just grim and miserable. You can see too much of director Josh Trank’s Chronicle, a found footage story about young people unequal to their strange new powers, in this movie, which is based on a comic book where a family of sexy, famous, rich celebrity genius scientists have off-the-wall adventures. I don’t even want to get into this movie’s Doctor Doom, who shows up for about 10 minutes and once again is just a generic angry guy who survived a generic Villain Creating Accident. There has not been and will never be a Fant5stic.

So what happened? What kept happening, with these movies? Will First Steps not allow it happen again?

The late Stephen Sondheim, titan of musical theater, once counseled that content dictates form. He meant this in relation to writing lyrics, but it applies to writing and producing far more broadly. Sometimes, a particular story demands to be told in a particular genre, story structure, or even artistic medium. This has been the challenge inherent in comic book film adaptations since the very beginning. These colorful characters, spouting corny and on-the-nose dialogue at utterly unsubtle villains in larger-than-life poses have somehow needed to be translated to the silver screen, and filmmakers have necessarily had to make compromises to the source material in order to do that.

Those compromises work best when they swing for the fences—when they make choices and then work to support those choices. The Daredevil, Punisher, and Kingpin of the Netflix (and now Disney+) Daredevil don’t always look like their characters from the comic books, but they look like the characters the actors and directors committed to making them. No two portrayals of DC Comics’ King Shark are the same in any of the exhaustingly wide array of Suicide Squad and/or Harley Quinn-branded stuff in which they all appear. Yet, I’m sure Ron Funches’ King Shark on the Harley Quinn cartoon show is the best one, even though he is surely nothing at all like he is in the comics, because the show made a choice about what kind of character he should be and committed to it, and that character is hilarious.

But also, and this is key: There are things one cannot compromise on. The core things that make a character or story resonate with people. Spider-Man and Batman evidently didn’t need to be inventor nerds, based on some of their most successful movie appearances. But Spider-Man needs to be your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and Batman needs to skulk in the dark and terrify criminals, or they simply don’t work.

What made the Fantastic Four work? What has to be in there? The Fantastic Four are a modern American family, conceived in the 1960s, when that concept was changing. Look at their powers versus their traditional roles: Mr. Fantastic a bendy and shapeshifting guy while Reed Richards is the consummate scientist and rule-follower and father figure, The Invisible Woman’s superpowers of literally being invisible and protecting the boys from things while Sue Storm is a brilliant modern career woman, The Thing being made of rock while Ben Grimm is a giant softy inside, and the Human Torch’s potentially most destructive powers while Johnny Storm is an exuberant youth. They are the world’s most normal mixed family, yet they go on absolutely bonker-balls adventures, in which planet-sized cosmic horrors try to eat the Earth, every brain on the planet is subsumed into one mega-brain that is trying to kill them, or they’re sent back in time by Doctor Doom and Ben becomes a pirate and is kinda into it.

Content should dictate form. Is this content too comic booky to be made into a movie that isn’t a total mess? We’ll find out when The Fantastic Four: First Steps drops, and we discover whether or not the fourth time’s the charm.

Kenneth Lowe is Blackbeard, A.K.A. the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing! You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social. To support his fiction, join his Patreon.