The 2015 movie that left Jamie Bell “bitterly disappointed” and why everyone saw it coming
Considering how iconic they are, the Fantastic Four have had some rotten luck on the big screen.
While the recent Marvel-approved First Steps was a lot of fun, it wasn’t that long ago that the super-team was being written off entirely. Of course, I’m talking about Fant4stic, the 2015 film, stylised as Fant4stic or FANT4STIC, depending on your taste, promised a lot with Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B Jordan, and Jamie Bell stepping up to play Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing, respectively.
Things looked quite promising on paper, but unfortunately, movies aren’t made on paper, and Fant4stic (I refuse to call it anything else) was nothing short of cataclysmic. While a superhero body horror is a really interesting idea, the film flopped hard and is widely regarded as not only one of the worst superhero movies ever made, but one of the worst movies ever made, with backlash so strong, it sent Josh Trank, its promising young director, into an exile he has never fully recovered from.
Before the body was even cold, the post-mortem of Fant4stic had already begun. In an era where superhero movies were the biggest thing around, how could this one fail by every conceivable metric?
There were major clashes behind the scenes between Trank, writer Jeremy Slater, and distributor 20th Century Fox, with a battle over the final cut of the film, too, and a new ending hastily thrown together when Fox decided they wanted a more optimistic finale.
Everyone has had their say on why Fant4stic was such a mess, where Miles Teller gave an interview saying that he knew they were “in trouble” as soon as he saw the first cut. As for Bell, who performed both the live-action and motion-capture performances for the group’s resident rock monster, he told the Los Angeles Times that he still had questions.
“There were several things on that movie I was clearly not privy to because I’m just an actor,” he said, cryptically, “Everything starts with the best of intentions. A production begins with the idea to make something that’s unique and original and with integrity. I think the film really strived towards those goals. I don’t know what happened between the launch of the voyage and the arrival. I think we were all bitterly disappointed with that film. But that’s just the way it goes sometimes.”
Bell and the rest of the gang must have been bitterly disappointed as there were already plans for a sequel before the movie began shooting, but diabolical reviews and a poor box office score (Fant4stic lost an estimated $80 to $100million) threw everything into doubt. In an era where comic book movies were making people millionaires and defining their legacies, this had to be devastating.
Luckily for the cast, they’ve all bounced back, but the shadow of Fant4stic is a long one, with people still wondering how such a slam-dunk idea could have gone so horribly wrong.
