The big news this weekend has been the seeming bombing of the $120 million Fantastic Four 2015 film reboot of the Marvel Comics’ super-hero family team. The movie is expected to pull in $30 million in North American theaters in its opening weekend, which is down from its original also low prediction of $45 million, after a very anemic Thursday opening and an extremely sluggish Friday.
Below are the Top 5 implications and fallout of Fox Studios’ flubbing the Fantastic Four 2015 movie reboot. The crystal ball knows all. ;) Expect the below to play out over the coming weeks and months, possibly years.
5. Fantastic Four 2017 movie sequel to be cancelled.
It is unlikely that there will be a sequel to this weekend’s film. It’s also unlikely if the film bombs as expected that Fox would attempt to reboot its reboot in 2 short years.
4. No X-Men / FF cross-over film.
Despite the buzz around Fox Studios’ X-Men franchise films including its upcoming Deadpool film, the much talked about X-Men / FF film will likely not come to pass with this version of the Fantastic Four.
3. Marvel Studios’ makes play for FF rights.
Marvel Studios does not own the cinematic rights to all its characters. Sony has the Spider-Man film rights, but Marvel Studios has come to some kind of agreement with them to share the character. Spider-Man is therefore set to appear in Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Civil War film.
If Marvel Studios really wants to make FF a big tent-pole franchise, after Fox has shown that it can’t do that, expect Disney and Marvel Studios to either try to get the rights back outright for nothing or swap other characters to get FF into the Marvel Cinematic Universe or share the FF like the Sony model with Spidey.
The Fantastic Four has also struggled sales wise in comic book form so its not clear if Marvel Studios will want a reboot of the FF reboot in its cinematic plans. There’s not even an ongoing Fantastic Four comic book series on stands as I type this.
2. Director Josh Trank may have trouble landing work.
Director Josh Trank resigned from an upcoming Star Wars film before he was let go after his purported antics reported from the set of Fantastic Four started circling amongst industry insiders. He was said to be aloof, dodged studio officials, apparently wasn’t a clear leader or communicator, among other criticisms.
Plus, when he started hearing the unrelenting bad buzz about the film, he recently went to twitter saying he had a better version of the film done about a year ago; implying the studio redid his film and if it stinks or bombs its not because of him. That tweet has since been deleted.
Putting unsubstantiated comments about Josh Trank’s on-set conduct to the side, why would any studio or producer want to work with a Director who airs the family laundry in public? And certainly in public before a film’s release? A director’s noted lack of confidence in a film does impact a film’s box office success.
1. Fox Studios will take less creative risks.
Expect future Marvel films from Fox to stick closer to original comic book material. While I support efforts to diversify the cast of Marvel super-hero properties, an African-American Johnny Storm was NOT the problem of this film; in fact I welcomed that. There was just so much of Fox’s FF 2015 film that deviated from the comic book material in even look and feel that its not surprising that it received crushing reviews. Plus why spend half the movie on an origin story when moviegoers got an origin story in the 2000s?
Also, if Fox reboots this or any other franchise, they may take a page from Sony with Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man. Fans and moviegoers know Spider-Man’s origin story from the Tobey Maguire outings; so that was a small part of Garfield’s film. There is now another reboot of the Spider-Man movie franchise planned with 2017’s Spectacular Spider-Man starring Tom Holland. Again, don’t expect a huge origin story as part of that from Sony, probably less of one that Garfield’s.
Fox unveiled an ambitious movie schedule for its Marvel properties. It’ll be interesting to see how that are changed in the coming weeks and months.
YOUR say.
What other implications and faallout are there for Fantastic Four 2015’s likely bombing this weekend?
