By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
Fantastic Four, premiering Aug. 7, is one strange movie. I don't mean on the screen, although it very well may be. Behind the scenes, though, it's complicated.
Let's tackle the movie first, which needs a lot of asterisks next to it.
First, this isn't the Quantum Quartet most people know. That would be the foursome introduced in 1961, the group that launched the Marvel Comics superhero universe.
Except they weren't necessarily superheroes. For the first two issues, they didn't even have the traditional superhero costume. They were primarily a group of explorers who also happened to be a tight-knit family. Oh, and due to their first adventure in Fantastic Four #1, where they tried to fly to the moon in an unshielded spaceship, they also had super-powers, based on the classical Greek elements of earth, air, fire and water.
And since they fought a number of large monsters in their early days, they weren't that divorced from what had been Marvel's bread and butter in the late 1950s, books like Tales to Astonish and Journey into Mystery. Those titles regularly featured large monsters, as often as not defeated by stoic scientists in lab coats. In Fantastic Four you had both a stoic scientist, Reed "Mr. Fantastic" Richards, and a monster, Ben "The Thing" Grimm.
Fantastic Four was an enormous hit in 1961, and the next year Marvel went full-on superhero, introducing Ant-Man, Iron Man, Spider-Man and Thor. (Perhaps hedging his bets, Marvel editor Stan Lee also introduced another monster, the incredible Hulk.) Avengers, Dr. Strange and X-Men followed in 1963, and Daredevil in 1964.
That original team was, more or less, what we saw in Twentieth Century Fox's Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007). But this movie is not those movies, and this team is not that team.
So, yeah, we're going to have another origin story.
This year's model is based on Ultimate Fantastic Four, a book introduced in 2004 in a line of Marvel comics set in an alternate universe. In this "Ultimate" universe, for example, Peter Parker was killed and his role as (Ultimate) Spider-Man was assumed by a multi-ethnic kid named Miles Morales. The Ultimate Nick Fury is black, whereas the one in our universe is white. The Avengers of this world look familiar, but are called "The Ultimates." And so on.
For the record, the Ultimate Reed Richards turned into a supervillain, and the Ultimate Invisible Girl and Ultimate Thing became a romantic couple. Also, their universe (and ours) is currently being destroyed in a big Marvel Comics summer crossover titled "Secret Wars." I don't think we'll see any of that in this movie!
Anyway, these "Ultimate" characters have essentially the same names and super-powers as the originals. But the movie makes another change from both the original model and the Ultimate one ... by casting a black actor as Johnny "Human Torch" Storm, who is white in both of his comic book incarnations.
Needless to say, a lot of fans were immediately up in arms about this. And to be honest, I'm not thrilled about it.
But I understand the problem today's moviemakers face when basing a film on superhero comics. And that is: The vast majority of major superheroes were created when virtually all entertainment was lily white. Black and Hispanic kids want to see someone who looks like them up on the screen, but before 1966 (and the Black Panther) there just weren't very many non-white heroes in the comics. So I understand the logic of integrating the early, all-white superhero world.
On the other hand, as a comics collector I'm a traditionalist. Part of the fanboy DNA, I'm afraid. Even so, change is OK -- I'd have no problem with a black Reed Richards or a black Ben Grimm, for example -- but not when it fundamentally alters a character. And the blood tie between Johnny Storm and his sister Susan "Invisible Woman" Storm is part of the bedrock upon which the Fantastic Four is built. The FF members aren't just a team, they're a family. But they're not all blood relatives, so why make the only two who are actually related look nothing alike, when the other two members are available for question-free makeovers?.
But, OK, we can deal. Especially if the movie is any good. And most Marvel Studios films are really, really good.
But there's another problem: This isn't a Marvel Studios production.
It's hard to believe now, but in the late 1990s Marvel Comics went through bankruptcy. During those dramatic days, management made some really bad deals for desperately needed cash. Among those deals were the sale -- not the licensing, but sale -- of the movie rights of most of their major properties. The reason Marvel Films launched its cinematic universe with Iron Man in 2008 is because Spider-Man is lodged at Sony Films, while X-Men and Fantastic Four (and all related properties) are housed at Twentieth Century Fox.
So, regardless of the Marvel logo at the beginning of the movie, this is a Fox production. Given the poor critical reception of the two previous FF movies, which Fox also produced, there's a huge question mark floating over this one.
But if that question mark turns into an exclamation point -- if Fantastic Four makes oodles of money -- then another huge development comes into play. Bryan Singer, the sometime X-Men director, told Yahoo UK (uk.movies.yahoo.com) that "ideas are in play" for an X-Men/Fantastic Four crossover.
Hoo-hah! That would be a lot of characters!
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter is peeved with Twentieth Century Fox. He's cut a deal with Sony to include Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- the web-spinner is rumored to have an appearance in Captain America: Civil War (2016) -- but Fox hasn't been as cooperative.
So Perlmutter's in a snit, and it appears that Fantastic Four and X-Men properties in the comics are likely to suffer for it. As reported at Comic Book Resources and Bleeding Cool websites, Perlmutter sees no reason to give Fox any free advertising, so as of this writing no Fantastic Four book is planned after the "Secret Wars" crossover. (Although the characters will be appearing in other books.) X-Men is too valuable a property to ignore, but it's likely the characters will be more or less shunted off to their own sandbox, with their role in the larger Marvel Universe taken over by the Inhumans franchise.
Now there's a civil war!
Will it continue? That's just one of the questions floating around Fantastic Four. Who knew a superhero movie could be so complicated?
Reach Captain Comics by email (capncomics@aol.com), the Internet (comicsroundtable.com), Facebook (Captain Comics Round Table) or Twitter (@CaptainComics)
Replies
Is anyone looking forward to the Inhumans receiving the large spotlight? Particularly fans? How have sales been lately?
The movie posters I saw surprised me by how shocking young the actors are. Those people do not look old enough to be the Fantastic Four, or even the New Mutants.
I saw an interview with all four actors on NBC's Today Show yesterday. The impression I got was that all four heroes will start out as young adults.
I found the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzEZ70eLH6g
They made the Guardians of the Galaxy work, and the Inhumans are, from a mainstream POV, X-Men (an already successful franchise) under another name, so I think it'll be worth watching.
Randy Jackson said:
The Ultimate Fantastic Four, on which this movie is based, are much younger than their 616 counterparts. The Baxter Building is a think tank/lab complex for young prodigies, including Reed Richards, who invents teleportation at age 11. He is 21 when he, Sue Storm (another prodigy), Johnny Storm (her brother, not a prodigy) and Ben Grimm (also not a prodigy) teleport to the "N-Zone" and get super-powers. Victor van Damme is also a prodigy at the Baxter Building, and it is his fault the N-Zone project goes afoul, although he blames Richards. He also gets powers, and begins calling himself Dr. Doom.
The adult in the room is the Baxter Building director, Gen. Franklin Storm.
Luis Olavo de Moura Dantas said:
They're integrating the old white heroes because they've seen totally new characters just don't work. They haven't really had a hit new character not based on somebody already existing since Wolverine and maybe Storm.
Just not right that Johnny is the same age as Reed. And Sue's the oldest member of the team now. And apparently she's adopted. This was not necessary and just gives people that don't like the casting another reason to complain. (Although the biggest complaint about the movie these days seems to be that the Thing doesn't wear pants.)
Invents teleportation at 11. That's interesting since The Official Guide to the Marvel Universe, despite knowing how smart Reed's supposed to be, said he entered college at 14. In comparison, the youngest college student in the real world entered college at 8 and had a Bachelor's Degree in anthropology at 10. He got a Master's at 14. Another real world prodigy beat his record, getting a Master's at 12.
Why exactly are there two non-prodigies in a think tank/lab complex for prodigies? They just happened to decide to visit the N-Zone (Negative Zone? Will Annihilus turn up in the sequel if it gets made?) on visitors' day?
I really think Fox should give the Fantastic Four back to Marvel. This would help relations between the two companies even with Fox holding onto the X-Men. It's not like they're making a fortune on the FF films. Three movies now (four if you count the Roger Corman film, which I've heard has been destroyed so only the bootleg copies still exist) and we keep seeing Doom in all of them. People unfamiliar with the characters probably think he's the only villain they have by now.
I was surprised that when Marvel "reimagined" their characters for the Ultimate line, while they had no problem making almost everyone younger, except for the Samuel L. Jackson version of Nick Fury, the majority of the characters who were straight white males in the 1960s retained all of those traits--a golden opportunity to diversify the line, and the biggest change they made to a major character was to give Wolverine a soul-patch (did that even last all the way thru the first year?) It would have been so much cooler if Miles Morales had been the Ulitmate Spider-Man right out of the gate, instead of just the latest in a long line of minority characters who somehow step into identities created by better known white guys!
And for a line created to get out from under the burden of existing continuity, they sure went out of their way to import problems they could have skipped completely: Nick Fury still wound up having fought in WW2, Black Widow was still a commie spy, Shang-Chi was still the son of a Devil Doctor Who Could Not Be Named (legally), etc
Okay, word is out (now that the FF movie is out in UK) that "It's clobbering time!" is what Ben Grimm's older, abusive brother used to say before beating him up.
Seriously.
Does anyone here wanna make a better FF movie than Hollywood???
What I found amusing was that people were saying that they don't have to explain how the new Johnny and Sue Storm can be brother and sister, how that they can still be biological siblings and how dare some of us assume that one of them had to be adopted.
Then Michael B. Jordan who is portraying Johnny wrote an essay in Entertainment Weekly to address the "controversy" casually mentions that Sue is Johnny's adopted sister, thus giving us the "needless" explanation.
Actually I would have preferred that Sue be African-American, a brilliant scientist, the emotional core of the team and Reed's love interest.
Or even having ALL of them be African-American if they truly wanted diversity since nearly all the X-Men characters are white.
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