The movie is bland and perfunctory—and if it had failed, the studio might have been forced to try harder next time.
So no doubt Marvel is breathing a slight sigh of relief now that early audiences have connected with the Fantastic Four —undaunted by crummy past attempts to put the characters on screen—and are ostensibly interested in the continuation of the Marvel saga.
How the film holds over the next few weeks is probably the more telling indicator, though; if all the diehards got their kicks out this weekend, there will be a precipitous and discouraging drop in receipts. A dark part of me almost welcomes that potential future. Even vaguely rooting for a movie to fail is a reckless thing to do in these days of fading industry; we’re talking about thousands of jobs here, done by people who have little say over the creative decisions at the top, not to mention the tastes of moviegoers. I don’t actually want any new movie to stumble. Yet a failure could be valuable for Marvel, could help the studio learn a lesson so that the inevitable superhero movies to come would, at least, be better. It wouldn’t be hard to improve upon Fantastic Four, an occasionally stylish but otherwise totally boilerplate superhero movie. At this uncertain point in MCU history, it’s a little shocking that the studio was comfortable delivering such a bland and perfunctory film—especially when it’s arriving at a crucial inflection point for both Marvel and the wider business. But bland Fantastic Four is, playing as an undercooked sequel to a movie that never was. It’s hard to care about these characters, and even harder to root for them when they make a pretty selfish choice about the future of humanity. Little of its tepid humor lands, and the winsome detail of the film’s opening minutes quickly falls away so that the rude mechanics of plot can be dealt with. It’s yet another middling entry in the post-Endgame tradition, a film that doesn’t launch the franchise headlong at the future so much as glumly drags us toward it. It certainly doesn’t help that the studio across town, long beleaguered DC, recently had a financial and creative success with Superman, a true reset of the house style. For once in their unending war, DC has pulled ahead of Marvel—with a former Marvel guy, James Gunn, at the helm. Had Fantastic Four really belly-flopped, it might have forced more studio-wide thinking about the future of the endeavor. Instead, Fantastic Four probably did just well enough to convince the powers that be that things are chugging along okay, that only minor tweaks need to be made. But I think there’s far more to be done than mere alterations. Creative integrity may not be the highest priority on executives’ lists, but maybe there’s still some interest in making the product genuinely good . Enough that someone over there will see the dwindling acclaim and slumping box office, and eventually pull the emergency brake to force a major shakeup. One idea? If DC is suddenly beating Marvel at the whole whimsical-meets-arch-meets-sweetly-sentimental thing that the latter used to be so good at, then Marvel could swing back to the age of the gritty superhero, which DC errantly prolonged for years. Marvel has gone dark and somber before—think of the closing minutes of Infinity War, or the beginning ones of Endgame—but the studio has never sustained that mood for an entire film, let alone a series of films. Maybe the X-Men, a ragtag band who have been on film in various iterations many times already this century, would be fitting subjects for such an experiment. Sure the ersatz horror movie The New Mutants didn’t work, but that movie was made before Disney had full control of these characters. We already know some old X-Men are slated to join Doomsday, so the company would have to figure out whether to fold those actors and characters into a reboot or start completely anew. But that can all be reasoned out. The key thing is that the X-Men have always been a little edgy and in their head, giving Disney a sturdy foundation to develop upon and tinker with. Or maybe the studio could take the heaps of money it’s made from the MCU over the last 17 years and spend it on standalone films about entirely different things, an attempt at a great rebuilding of Hollywood tradition. You know: middle-budget but commercial movies with compelling movie stars that tell stories we haven’t seen before. Like what used to exist outside the realm of independent cinema. But that’s perhaps too fantastical; it’s probably wiser to stick with the flying people and their grand battles with space monsters. Maybe next time, just add a dog.
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