It should come as no surprise that in addition to the big announcements yesterday, especially the Disney Marvel deal, there was other news. One such piece that may please many Marvel fans out there who were less than thrilled with the way the first two movies turned out is the late breaking revelation that Fox is rebooting The Fantastic Four franchise. But wait, don’t get too excited because Akiva Goldsman, the man who wrote the two worst Batman films in history (Batman and Robin and Batman Forever) and the feature film version of Lost In Space featuring Matt Leblanc is in charge of the reboot for the studio.
Fortunately, he’s not actually writing the script and is just a producer. Michael Green, co-executive producer of Heroes, co-writer of the new Green Lantern and creator of the short-lived series Kings is the one tapped to write the new script. So, that may mean good things for the new Fantastic Four franchise. In case you don’t recall, 2005’s Fantastic Four and the 2007 sequel Rise of the Silver Surfer were directed by Tim Story and starred Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis. Since the details of the reboot are still being worked out, it is unclear if any of them will return. Or, if they should.
To be honest, I wouldn’t mind if nobody from the first films returned. I wasn’t a big fan of Tim Story’s direction nor most of the performances except for Gruffudd and Chiklis. Starting over fresh is not a bad idea and now that Iron Man and The Dark Knight have clearly shown the way to make really great comic book movies, maybe Michael Green can turn The Fantastic Four into something great also. Let’s hope so because these characters deserve a better cinematic treatment then they’ve gotten so far.
