It's been an eventful weekend on the Fantastic Four movie front, and not all of it is encouraging. Here's the latest news...
The secrecy surrounding the new Fantastic Fourmovie has certainly led to some wild speculation over the last few months. The odd set photo leak resulted in a flurry of threatening lawyer letters, the speculation about the origins of their powers and the nature of their powers has caused all manner of heartache, and even the simple issue of whether or not the FF live in the same universe as Fox's X-Men films has resulted in some contradictory quotes.
In fact, let's start with that one.
Simon Kinberg has walked back his previous statements (thereby walking back even earlier statements) that the Fantastic Four and X-Men universes wouldn't ever cross over.
"I love the characters. I love the characters in Fantastic Four, and I love the new cast. Obviously I love the characters and cast of X-Men,"he told ComicBook.com. "So, hypothetically, the notion of putting them together is really intriguing, and there's some really fun stuff that the comics have done in the past. So it's not out of the realm of possibility."
And then there's the matter of costumes. The Human Torch himself, Michael B. Jordan, told Good Morning America (again, via ComicBook.com) that these aren't exactly superhero suits that the team wears. In fact, he describes them as "a new look. We are all in containment suits...it's gritty. It's a gritty film."
I have to say, this talk about "containment suits" not only makes perfect sense in the context of the film, but it also sounds a little like what we heard from a fake Josh Trank Twitter account last month, which sounded authentic enough to fool me at the time. "They're not tight, I can tell you that," the phony Trank said. Oh, who am I kidding? I'm still trying to make up for being taken in by that nonsense.
And then there's this latest bit of nonsense regarding the publishing future of the Fantastic Four comics. Several months back, there was some controversy indicating that the Fantastic Four comic would be canceled some time around the premiere of the film, which certainly seems like an odd time to do these things. It turns out that the Fantastic Four will indeed publish its final issue (at least for a little while) with issue #645. This may not seem like much considering Marvel's recent propensity for canceling titles and relaunching them with new #1s a month later. But...
The word on the street is that the reason for the cancelation, though, isn't an attempt to create demand or boost the team's profile (as we saw with the improbably excellent Superior Spider-Manstoryline), but rather, just the opposite. Supposedly (via Bleeding Cool), Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter isn't thrilled with how Fox has handled the rights to the FF, and won't use actual Marvel product to help promote their movie.
If that last bit is true, well, that doesn't seem terribly smart for any of the parties involved. Comic book sales are absolutely nothing compared to movie ticket sales for superhero films, and one would think that Marvel should be doing everything possible to entice ticket buyers into comic shops to buy products featuring marquee characters in summer blockbusters.
If the long game is indeed an attempt to get the Fantastic Four into the Marvel Studios stable, this seems like a fairly petty and potentially unsound way of going about it. Especially considering that the FF are quite literally the book that jump-started Marvel as we know it.
The Fantastic Fouropens on August 7th, 2015.
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