Fantastic Four is one of the worst reviewed superhero movies in the past few years, or possibly ever. The movie was made as an attempt to create a franchise out of the beloved comic book characters that would do better than their campy, 2005 and 2007 counterpart. Unfortunately, the movie seemed to further sink the hopes of these beloved comic book characters ever getting another chance at the box office. It proved to us again that Marvel characters are done best by Marvel. With a Disney-owned production, the issues that plagued this movie from the beginning may not have happened, and it would have prevented any further problems from arising.
The director of the film later spoke of his disappointment with how the movie turned out, as creative control was taken away from him by the studio in post-production due to inappropriate on set behavior such as being intoxicated while working. Other reports say that studio interference drove him to his breaking point and the studio took over. Despite all of this, he claimed that he had a “fantastic version of the film that would have been well reviewed” a year ago. While we may never know if any version of this movie would be well received, we can hope that there was once a possibility of this being good.
The Fantastic Four might have to wait another 10 or 15 years for a movie to finally do the justice (if the superhero genre hasn’t died out by then).
Why am I talking about a failed superhero movie that nobody saw?
Well, our class is trying to make a movie right now. We’re supposed to be adapting Macbeth to take place in WWII. So far, it hasn’t gone so well. We were originally given a tight schedule and lots of class time, but that didn’t work out because it’s been about a month and we’ve only filmed one act. Right now, we need to find a solution, because we have until spring break to pull something together. So far, I’m not confident in our abilities to do anything except for scream at each other or make extremely passive aggressive comments in a group chat (which almost immediately turn into memes).
Our problems remind me a lot of Fantastic Four’s.
We’ve been having a power struggle, and we don’t know how to work together in this kind of situation. We can’t cooperate or follow the structure of an actual film crew, because we all want all of the power with none of the responsibility. I promise you this isn’t me singling out anybody because that’s just how we all work. We’re teenagers! Our brains are still developing so we sometimes do stupid things like say we’re going to be somewhere and not go or argue over something that probably doesn’t really matter for 80 minutes. We’re teenagers with extremely high expectations set on us. What I can say is that nobody wants to give up, because we’re all a little bit afraid of failure.
I truly hope that some kind of good life lesson comes out of this, because so far all it’s done is make us angry at every little aspect of this assignment. Right now, all I can hope is that we don’t crash and burn. At this point, we have already failed our original assignment, so now we have to work around the problem.
I just hope we don’t turn out like Fantastic Four (2015), with a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Maybe we can hope for Fantastic Four (2005), because that at least has a 27% rating.