Not-so Marvelous film disappoints
By: Caitlin Moynihan, Columnist
If you’re a major Marvel Universe fan like I am, then this summer you were mostly excited about three things: “Ant Man,” “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and the highly anticipated re-vamp of “Fantastic Four.”
While “Avengers” crushed at the box office and broke the sales record, and although “Ant Man” was a surprisingly huge hit, “Fantastic Four” left a majority of the audience fantastically disappointed. The movie had secured an all-star cast and writer/producer Simon Kinberg, who has created three of the best “X-Men” movies, and it seemed as if it would surely become the biggest blockbuster of the season.
The trouble all started once the movie hit post-production and press tours began happening. Rumors about arguments on set to the director being over-analytical and even telling the actors when to blink and breathe came to surface, one of the actors even allegedly told director, Josh Trank, that the movie wasn’t good! Some people believe that all press is good press, but that wasn’t the case here.
One of the best things about the Marvel Universe movies is how obvious it is that the actors have chemistry and friendship both on and off-screen. (I mean, who didn’t love when Chris Pratt from “Guardians of the Galaxy” and Chris Evans, aka Captain America, went to the Super Bowl together?) It became evident during their press interviews that the actors wanted to be doing anything other than answering questions about their movie, making the movie seem less-than-fabulous and decreasing the level of excitement for its release.
While many people took these as warning signs to not see the movie, I still had some sliver of hope left and decided that there’s no way that this version of “Fantastic Four” could be any worse than the original. So I ventured to the theater one evening and I knew I was in trouble when I got there 15 minutes late and there was only one other person in the whole theater.
Within ten minutes of the movie I already regretted my decision and I honestly can’t tell you too much about it because I’m trying to block it out of my memory.
With all this being said, I was absolutely shocked when Kinberg said he wanted to move forward with creating a sequel. He was preemptively green-lighted to write a sequel before the first movie released, but with the plummeting ticket sales and overall dissatisfaction, I thought that a sequel would be an automatic no-no. Kinberg said in an interview to MTVNews that “I do believe there is a great ’Fantastic Four’ movie that we’ve made with that cast. So I’m gonna figure out what that is.”
All I know is that I won’t be putting any bets on when we actually see a sequel to “Fantastic Four.”
