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Simon Kinberg on Why the Fantastic Four Reboot Didn’t Work


Fantastic Four hadn't been a success, to say the least. The 2015 filmed bombed at the box office both commercially and critically, even surpassing the negative reviews of its predecessors. While this leaves the future of Fantastic Four 2 in danger, the movie's producer Simon Kinberg is finally addressing the big question why the movie tanked.

While at the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Kinberg didn't blame one specific aspect of the movie for all its faults. Apparently, he thinks there's only one facet that he and his team had done wrong, and that's by not keeping true to the original source material's tone.

Kinberg expounded:

I don't think that there is, in any movie that doesn't work, a single decision that is the reason that that movie doesn't work. I think that there were many decisions we made along the way that led to a movie that people didn't like and to a movie that I would do differently next time.
I think the biggest takeaway for me [is that] the tone of the movie, while really interesting and ambitious, ran counter to the DNA of the source material. I think the source material of Fantastic Four is bright, optimistic, poppy in tone.
There's a sort of plucky spirit to those characters, and we made a darker, sort of body-horror kind of version of Fantastic Four, which again, as I say it now, sounds really interesting and cerebrally ambitious, but isn't necessarily Fantastic Four.

Kinberg certainly got the "tone" part right. While other comic book films are dark, they certainly had a right to be. Fantastic Four is arguably more of a lighter story, and making the movie gritty will just not work. At least the 2005 and 2007's Fantastic Four films got that part right.

There may be other problems in the Fantastic Four reboot that Kinberg may have failed to mention. Whether that's because they're not true or because he just refuses to admit it, at least fans can rest assured that the studio now recognizes what they did wrong. There is hope yet for the sequel, surprising as that may sound.

20th Century Fox may have pulled Fantastic Four 2 from its original release date of July 2017, but it hasn't been cancelled officially by the studio.

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