Alpharius wrote:
I'm not sure it is necessarily 'fair' or 'smart' to look back 50 years and say "Wow, what a bunch of evil douches!".

That article is yet ANOTHER thing to blame on this new, horrible Fantastic Four movie!

 Alpharius wrote:
We need a legit Dr. Doom even more!

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
We need a legit Dr. Doom even more!

Quoted for truth

the actual FF characters in the first 2 were ok, and even in this they wern;t terrible....... they just had a poor (or non existant plots),

but the Glory that is Dr DOOM of Ruler of Latveria has been a damp squib all the way through

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
you mean to tell me that Doom is so powerful that it takes four superpowered people to stop him?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Marvel have done a good job and earned their reputation, but it'd be foolish to think that some of their movies aren't risks. Guardians was a risk. It paid off (in a big way). Ant-Man was a risk. It paid off (pretty well).

Not everything with Marvel is a sure thing though.

The Washington Post wrote:
‘Fantastic Four’ is ‘The Room’ of superhero movies

When I saw how “Fantastic Four” was ranked on Rotten Tomatoes, I ran straight to the theater. Eight percent fresh? I wondered. But how? Was that even possible? That was south of Congress and genital herpes.

Now I know why. It was like Tommy Wiseau directed a superhero movie. It was like watching the Fox News GOP debate, but without the plot, stakes or cheery presence of Donald Trump. Whenever something crashes and burns this badly, it deserves a closer look. What went so wrong?

One of the elements of Wiseau’s horrible classic “The Room” that makes it such a masterpiece is how doggedly it sets up situations and set pieces that are familiar from other films. Love scenes. Fights. Football? But then it doesn’t understand why those set pieces work. How do you show that two people are in love? Well, I don’t know. How about they tell each other, repeatedly, that “I’m crazy about you.” How do you know they’re upset? I don’t know, how about they shout “YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, LISA!”

This was like that.

Usually, superhero movies contain certain tropes and elements

There’s life before. There’s the event where you gain powers, usually accompanied by a loss of some sort. There’s a montage where the characters learn how to use their powers. Then, after they fail once (but learn, bond and grow in the process) they succeed a second time and we all go home happy with stomachs full of popcorn.

Loosely, this is the superhero movie structure. Even if they don’t contain all of those things, usually they at least contain a couple of key elements, like someone to root for, or a plot.

“Fantastic Four” was above these things.

It wasn’t like they threw out the baby with the bathwater, in the editing room. It’s as though they made an explicit point to keep the bathwater and lose the baby.

It was like the executives behind it asked themselves the following questions:

What if we removed all the parts of superhero movies that people enjoy and just had a lot of footage of people staring at computer screens waiting for things to load?

What if we made a superhero movie where we just SKIPPED the year when the team discovers their powers?

What if we cut out the part where the protagonists bond, do you think the audience would mind?

What if the big scientific discovery of the movie is something that an 8-year-old boy built in his garage in the first 10 minutes but I guess it took almost a full hour of movie time and more Movie Science to rebuild it bigger?

What if we literally had a science teacher so bad that when the hero teleports something during a science fair, he says “YOU ARE KICKED OUT OF THIS FAIR BECAUSE WHAT YOU DID WAS MAGIC, NOT SCIENCE”?

What if the hero got a scholarship to something called the Baxter Institute or Baxter Foundation but the movie never explains whether it’s a school or a lab or an orphanage or what?

What if The Thing didn’t wear pants?

What if the entire climax is fought in a CGI land where there are no clear rules or stakes, so much so that someone has to keep yelling what everyone is doing and why because otherwise you have no idea what’s going on other than there is a lot of blue flashing light?

What if Kate Mara’s special genius skill in the movie was pattern recognition?

Seriously, pattern recognition.

What if literally someone goes to Kate Mara at a key moment and says WE NEED SOMEONE WHO CAN RECOGNIZE A PATTERN, would that be good? Is that the kind of drama people have come to expect?

What if instead of having characters reveal themselves through action, we just had them tell each other what their motives were, saying things like “You look really in your element.” or “No, this is your home.” or “This is what you’ve always wanted.” or “I know why you’re doing this.” or “Let me tell you who you are.”

What if the villain’s power is he can kill everyone just by thinking about it, but then when he gets to his home planet where his powers are strongest, he can’t?

What if the final climax of the film is someone saying “TEAMWORK! THAT WAS WHAT WE WERE MISSING!”

What if someone unironically says, “Please, Victor. We’re not gods.”

What if the film includes a scene where Miles Teller carries a big stack of books over to Kate Mara in a library, pulls out “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” and says, “They have great books here. This is my favorite book. In it, a man named Captain Nemo builds a submarine! It goes deeper than anything has ever gone.”

What if our main romance is two people whose chemistry could best be described as Two People Who Both Want To Leave The Room Because They Are Running Behind But Don’t Want To Be The First To End The Conversation Because That Would Be Rude?

What if their most romantic exchange goes as follows:
“I’m adopted,” Kate Mara says.
“I know what that’s like,” Miles Teller says.
“You’re adopted?” Kate Mara says.
“No,” says Miles Teller, “but I wish I were.”

What if nobody develops powers or does anything until about an hour has gone by?

What if we made a superhero movie with all the urgency and stakes of your grandmother, on the phone, retelling her trip to the grocery while she putters around the house?

What if the heroes had to recruit the assistance of a Clearly Evil person whose last name was Von Doom and who says subtle, ambiguous things like “I don’t think humanity deserves a second chance”?

What if the basis for everyone getting powers was that they all got mysteriously drunk off a single tiny flask and Miles Teller decided to call up a friend whom he hadn’t seen for months (days? years? the timeline is never clear) and take him with them to another dimension and nobody blinked an eye? They all just nodded and said, “Sure, bring your non-scientist friend into our secret lab, slap a suit on him (we’ve got a spare suit, I guess!) and let’s travel interdimensionally.”

What if their motivation for doing this was “everyone remembers Neil Armstrong but no one remembers the scientists who sent him”?

What if Kate Mara brings them back by doing that “hacker” thing where your hands go clickety-clickety-clack over the computer keys frantically to “override”?

What if when they come back some blue energy goes BOOM so she gets powers even though she did not get to go get space drunk with the boys, because perhaps she had seen “The Fly” and knew better than to just hop willy-nilly into a teleporter?

What if Miles Teller just disappears for a year?

What if the last word of the movie was someone about to say “Fantastic Four” but they cut to credits before he could actually say it?

What if we made a superhero movie where one of the climactic moments was Miles Teller very slowly pulling his arm back into his sleeve?

“Fantastic Four” is the answer to all of these questions. I would call it a trainwreck, but “Trainwreck” was actually good. This was . . . something else. I’d see it again, at midnight, if they let me throw spoons at the screen.

The Hollywood Reporter wrote:'Fantastic Four' Blame Game: Fox, Director Josh Trank Square Off Over On-Set "Chaos"

Days before Fantastic Four opened, director Josh Trank sent an email to some members of the cast and crew to say he was proud of the film, which, he wrote, was "better than 99 percent of the comic-book movies ever made."

"I don't think so," responded one castmember.

Maybe if Trank had left it at that, Hollywood insiders and fan websites could have played their own parlor games as to who was at fault for the film's colossal failure and Fantastic Four would have faded into the history books as did John Carter and other bombs before it. (The $122 million-budgeted film opened to just $25.7 million in the U.S. and $34 million abroad, far below even the most cautious predictions.)

But Trank, 31, could not resist tweeting on Aug. 6, as the movie was hitting theaters, that he had made "a fantastic version" of the film that audiences would "probably never see." Though Trank quickly deleted the tweet, his public disavowal of the film at such a key moment enraged 20th Century Fox executives and stirred a pot that had begun to bubble when the director was dropped by Lucasfilm from a Star Wars stand-alone film at the end of April, prompting THR to report that one of the causes was his erratic behavior on Fantastic Four. Now, insiders on the film say the situation was worse than previously revealed, and Trank has enlisted pit-bull lawyer Marty Singer to advocate on his behalf. And so the game of blame is underway.

Fantastic Four is not the only big studio film to go flying off the rails, ostensibly because a director is in over his head. Sometimes a studio can salvage the project, as Paramount did when it shut down World War Z amid crew complaints about director Marc Forster and commissioned a rewrite of the third act. The film went on to gross $540 million worldwide.

Universal intervened to save the original The Bourne Identity when director Doug Liman seemed unable to pull that film together. It launched a franchise, but producer Frank Marshall — brought in to rescue the movie — said later that he had taken unprecedented measures to get the movie done. "I've always had a respect for the line between a producer and a director," Marshall told me in 2005, "and I had to step over that line into something that I feel is the director's responsibility."

Liman moved on to his next project, Mr. & Mrs. Smith with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, only to run into similar problems. Akiva Goldsman, who was a producer on that film, called him "a madman," and Liman filed a grievance with the Directors Guild saying his prerogatives as director had been compromised. But the film grossed $478 million worldwide, and Liman's reputation suffered no serious damage.

In Trank's case, multiple sources associated with the project say the director did not produce material that would have opened the way to a salvageable film. And by several accounts, he resisted help. "He holed up in a tent and cut himself off from everybody," says one high-level source. Literally, there was a tent on the Louisiana set. "He built a black tent around his monitor," says a crewmember. "He was extremely withdrawn." Between setups, this person adds, "he would go to his trailer and he wouldn't interact with anybody."

Sources say Fox believed in what one executive calls a "grounded, gritty version of Fantastic Four that was almost the opposite of previous versions" — and initially thought Trank could deliver that. Several sources say Fox stood by Trank as he pushed a gloomy tone on young stars Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell. "During takes, he would be telling [castmembers] when to blink and when to breathe," one person says. "He kept pushing them to make the performance as flat as possible."

There were worrying personal issues as well. As THR reported in May, Trank and his dogs allegedly caused more than $100,000 worth of damage to a rented house in Baton Rouge that he and his wife occupied while the film was shooting there. Sources say now that after landlord Martin Padial moved to evict Trank, photographs of the landlord's family that were in the house were defaced. Padial made a complaint to the local sheriff's department and filed a civil suit in Louisiana that is sealed. Padial's attorney, Michael Bienvenu, declined to comment on the matter. The sheriff's department says the case was "closed as a civil matter between landlord and tenant."

Neither Trank nor Singer would comment.

A crewmember acknowledges that Trank bears much of the fault for the film's problems but also says the Fox studio should not escape blame. The movie was "ill-conceived, made for the wrong reasons and there was no vision behind the property," this person says. "Say what you will about Marvel but they have a vision."

As Fox hurried to put the project into production before rights to the material reverted to Marvel, the studio was scrambling with multiple rewrites and delays in starting the film. They "were afraid of losing the rights so they pressed forward and didn't surround [Trank] with help or fire him. They buried their heads in the sand." Fox declined to comment.

Another source says the notion of firing Trank came up even before the cameras started to roll. But Fox put its faith in him because he had directed the studio's 2012 found-footage hero movie Chronicle, which grossed $127 million worldwide on a $12 million budget. Based on that, insiders say Fox executives thought they had found an "in-house director," a young talent who could become another J.J. Abrams. And the studio was trying to shake off its reputation for micromanaging filmmakers. So executives were reluctant to interfere on Fantastic Four despite warnings of trouble.

When the seriousness of the problems could no longer be ignored, says a key source on the project, it was too late to fire the director. "How do you ask someone to take over half of a movie shot by someone else?" he says. "You either hire somebody desperate for work or you [start over], write off pretty much the whole budget and lose the cast."

As filming wound toward an unhappy close, the studio and producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker engaged in a last-minute scramble to come up with an ending. With some of the cast not fully available at that point and Kinberg juggling X-Men: Apocalypse and Star Wars, a lot of material was shot with doubles and the production moved to Los Angeles to film scenes with Teller against a green screen. "It was chaos," says a crewmember, adding that Trank was still in attendance "but was neutralized by a committee." Another source says the studio pulled together "a dream team," including writer and World War Z veteran Drew Goddard, to rescue the movie. Whether the final version of the film is better or worse than what Trank put together is a matter of opinion, of course, but the consensus, clearly, is that neither was good.

One central player on the film says the process of making big films often is messy, but in many cases the studio can fight its way out of difficulties. A Fantastic Four crewmember concurs but says that doesn't relieve the studio of its responsibility for what went wrong with this film. "To me, it is a classic indictment of the entire system," he says. "Give Josh Trank a $20 million movie. Groom him. But they don't make those movies anymore. … Nobody should escape scrutiny on this one. Everyone should take a good look in the mirror, myself included. Even I probably did the movie for the wrong reasons."

 angelofvengeance wrote:
Hilariously, this film made it to #1 in the UK Box Office lol.