Last year Chris Evans confirmed a lot of suspicions when he said that he and the rest of his cast wouldn’t be coming back for a third Fantastic Four. But it looks like Fox isn’t interested in just giving that property back to Marvel; according to IESB, they’re looking into a full scale reboot.
If anybody is going to have the inside scoop on what’s happening at Fox, it’ll be IESB. Those guys are pretty chummy with Tom Rothman, so I’m imagining this isn’t just a random bit of leaked news but a trial balloon of some sort. IESB reports that the thought is to take the franchise away from family friendliness and make it something closer to Iron Man.
But who cares? What Rothman and Fox don’t get is that it’s not about the tone – the tone of their first Fantastic Four films were, to me, spot on – but that talent. And while I think they did a great job in casting the first time around (with the exception of Jessica Alba), they dropped the ball when it came to the director. But expect that ball to get dropped again – Fox likes to work with people they can push around, not with filmmakers who have style, vision or balls.
Of course Fantastic Four isn’t the only reboot on the horizon; Fox has made noise about rebooting Daredevil as well. In the end I only care about these reboots if they allow Marvel to have real say in them, and if Fox allows them to exist in the Marvel Movieverse, which seems really unlikely to me. In the meantime I’m just going to assume that Fox will be yet again pissing away franchises.
But if we’re rebooting, does this mean I can begin agitating for Peyton Reed to finally get his shot at doing a Fantastic Four set in the 60s?