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Fantastic Four rebooted – New films to restart the franchise
Fantastic Four is the latest series to be getting an early reboot from 20th Century Fox. The news has been reported that Fox are very keen to aim the new Fantastic Four movies at a slightly more mature audience and stay away from the bubble gum formula they had with the past two movies. The frequency of these reboots appears to be getting closer and closer with the original Fantastic Four being released in 2005 and its sequel Fantastic Four rise of the Silver Surfer only coming out two years ago back in 2007, so what exactly is going wrong?
It seems since the Dark Knight got seriously dark on us, that the superhero movies are starting to lean towards the more gritty and realistic style. 20th Century Fox seem to be all to aware that comic book licenses are a right to print money currently if well done, and it looks as though their eagerness to reboot the Fantastic Four would confirm this. But looking at the figures, they didn’t exactly do badly on the last two films, both made more than double their original budget with the original making more than triple.
So what’s the problem here, well critically both films were less than favorably received and I guess to make a third movie in a series which already seems to have run its course could be difficult. Maybe Fox are looking for a way to keep the fan base but create a franchise which is more sustainable and more in line with the acclaim that movies like the Dark Knight and Iron Man have recently received.
Interesting side note here, in order for Fox to keep the film rights to the Fantastic Four they had to film a movie before a certain time, otherwise they would have been in breach of their agreement. To get round the legal side of things they actually made a Fantastic Four movie back in 1994 that was never fully released, and you can check out some of the very um impressive results here via YouTube.
Ultimately how are Fox going to do better this time around, any Ideas?