Blog Archives
Everybody Remember Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four Movie?
This documentary looks positively delightful.
The story of this movie is great. Back in the day, in order to hold on to the movie rights to the Fantastic Four, the studio hired Roger Corman to make a crappy, never-to-be-released F4 movie. This is the story of that movie. I have seen it, and I think I recall it not being so bad – despite obviously cheesy and terrible special effects and acting.
I am definitely going to have to find this documentary when it comes out. It’s called Doomed.
I Do Not Want an X-Men/Fantastic Four Movie Crossover
Ever since the monumental success of Marvel’s The Avengers movie – to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars – all of the other studios are scrambling to make team-up movies as well. Because when something succeeds in Hollywood, everyone else wants to do that exact thing (hence the 3D craze). The sequel to Man of Steel is now going to feature both Batman and Wonder Woman, with rumors of even more Justice League cameos.
But making even less sense is the desire of FOX Studios to put their X-Men and rebooted Fantastic Four franchises into a shared universe. I may just be another nerd angrily ranting on the Internet, but I have zero interest in this coming to pass.
Abomination!
First of all, this reeks of studio manipulation, and I don’t like studio manipulations. Marvel and Disney pulled off a masterstroke combining their Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and Hulk movies into The Avengers, and FOX wants that same success regardless of how much sense it makes.
And that’s the second thing, it doesn’t make any sense! The X-Men and Fantastic Four don’t have anything to do with one another! In the history of comics, the two teams have barely said two words to each other. They live in entirely different corners of the Marvel Universe, dealing with entirely different themes. The X-Men use super-powers as a metaphor for minorities. The Fantastic Four use super-powers to go on awesome adventures, pushing the envelope of science fiction and fantasy.
Get back to your own sides!
But I’ll never be able to convince a studio of this. Heck, I probably can’t even convince some of you reading this. But it’s my rant, and I’m gonna rant it.
What point would it serve? Money, obviously. That’s the only answer studios care about. But Marvel Studios just seems above all of that nonsense. Yes, they want to make money too, but they seem to have integrity. They took their time with the Thor and Captain America films instead of rushing to the Avengers after the success of Iron Man. They’re taking their time to build up their movieverse, taking risks on films like Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man. But FOX is just churning out superhero films helter skelter. We all know that if they stop making X-Men and Fantastic Four movies, then the rights will revert back to Marvel and Disney.
And as much as I liked X-Men: First Class, I can’t imagine ‘quality’ is at the forefront of FOX’s plans.
They made the first two Fantastic Four films, after all.
They gave the world this
Storywise, what possible sense would it make to combine the X-Men and Fantastic Four films? Unless FOX plans to make the rebooted Fantastic Four into mutants, what could they possibly have to do with the X-Men? It’s not like the movie X-Men are superheroes. Not in the way the Fantastic Four are superheroes. What are they going to do? Team up to take down a partnership between Dr. Doom and Magneto? How could the massive, sprawling, time-traveling plot of the X-Men films possibly lead to them teaming up with the Fantastic Four? Why saddle a rebooted Fantastic Four onto the X-Men instead of letting them stand alone?
Neither team has any business being subservient to the other. Neither team has any business being in a movie together.
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
Still, I’d probably watch it.
Hench-Sized Comic Book Reviews – 10/26/13
If you’re reading this, I’m probably neck-deep in Batman: Arkham Origins by this point. I’ll try to have a review and some lists up eventually, but right now, I’m knocking criminal heads together and hopefully kicking Penguin in the crotch! Fortunately, I still found the time to read some comics this week, and most of them are a hoot!
Both Battle of the Atom and Lights Out delivered solid issues this week, and a Justice League tie-in to Forever Evil was equally as strong. I’m pretty much enjoying all of these Big Event comics, though Battle of the Atom is still coming out on top. To try something new, I picked up Velvet #1 from the creative team of Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting. I was…not impressed, but it’s still a fine comic from Image.
Winner of Comic Book of the Week, however, goes to Aquaman! Writer Geoff Johns delivers an origin for the Lost City of Atlantis, and it’s just as good as the rest of his Aquaman series. Go Aquaman!
Though if we’re talking Moment of the Week, that definitely goes to Jason Aaron’s latest chapter of Battle of the Atom. He’s almost as good as Bendis when it comes to writing these merry mutants.
Cyclops’ face is priceless!
Comic Reviews: Aquaman #24, FF #13, Justice League #24, Red Lanterns #24, Velvet #1 and Wolverine and the X-Men #37.
6 Things I Want To See In the Fantastic Four Reboot
A new, rebooted Fantastic Four movie is coming. Despite the fact that Fox so completely botched the franchise the first two times around, they’re not about to let go of a popular superhero movie license in an era when The Avengers made $1.5 Billion worldwide. That’s in dollars. So Fox will simply try again with a reboot. Because audiences and respect for the property just don’t matter. Movie making is a business, and a Fantastic Four movie has the potential to be good business.
Just like they thought Jessica Alba was going to be good business.
I’ll try to keep the Alba-bashing to a minimum
Now don’t get me wrong, a rebooted Fantastic Four has the potential to be great. I loved both X-Men: First Class and The Amazing Spider-Man, despite first assuming both would be terrible cash grabs. So with an upcoming Fantastic Four reboot, I’m going to try and keep an open mind. Will it be grim and gritty? Will it tie in to the old movies? What will the action figures be like? Well here are 6 things that I hope to see in the new Fantastic Four movie.
Project: Rooftop Fantastic Four Designs Are In!
The Project: Rooftop Fantastic Four redesign costumes are in, and they are, pardon the pun, fantastic! If you don’t know, Project: Rooftop is a site dedicated to redesigning superhero costumes. They hold annual contests and even have some pros weigh in on the contestants. These contests produce some of the absolute coolest costume redesigns on the Internet. And I absolutely love this kind of artistic geekery. If only the real comic book companies relied on creative types like these when it came to giving their heroes new costumes.
The best DC Comics can come up with is to add a ton of piping and lines to their new superhero reboot costumes.
Anyway, check out the #1 entry, drawn by Alejandro Bruzzese!
Personally, I’m not a big fan of this design. I like what he was going for, with the color-coded T-shirts, but it doesn’t say ‘Fantastic’ to me. It definitely plays up the explorers/adventurnauts aspect of the Fantastic Four, but it’s not as elegant or awesome as it could be. Still, the judges voted this one as the very best, so who am I to argue?
Join me after the jump for the other winners and a couple of my favorites!
Henchman-4-Hire 