Writer Shares Original Vision for Much-Maligned ‘Fantastic Four’ Movie

The making of 2015’s Fantastic Four has always been more interesting than the actual movie. A day before it was released, Director Josh Trank disavowed the final version of the film. Days after it started its unceremonious run in theaters, the Hollywood Reporter shared details of a tumultuous set that placed blame on Trank. Regardless of who was to blame, Fox wound up assembling a team that outranked Trank to make a new ending. That conclusion wound up being tonally different from the rest of the film and, long story short, a bad movie was born.

Now a new angle to this tale of woe has surfaced. ScreenCrush recently interviewed Jeremy Slater, the writer first hired to pen the screenplay. He described his version as having “lots of humor, lots of heart, lots of spectacle.” Here are some of the details he shared.

• The movie would have started with Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, and Victor Von Doom attending a kind of Hogwarts-style school for kid geniuses.

• Instead of going to Planet Zero, they’d go to the Negative Zone, a setting created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby back in 1966.

• Doctor Doom would have emerged from the Negative Zone and declared war on Earth.

• Mole Man would have unleashed a monster on Manhattan.

• There would have been a robot that Slater described as “BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed.”

• A teaser would have revealed the team’s next foes, Galactus and Silver Surfer.

There are two reasons, it would seem, that Slater’s version never happened. One, after Trank came on board, he steered it into a darker, more serious movie. Two, Slater’s version would have been expensive. As he pointed out, “Would you spend $300 million on a Fantastic Four film? “Particularly after the previous two films left a fairly bad taste in audiences’ mouths?”

Ultimately, Slater was credited as one of the writers and some of his story elements remained, but only one line of dialogue stayed in the movie: “Don’t blow up.”

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