Well, this is suboptimal.  I watched every Fantastic Four movie nearly six months ago, but I haven’t had a chance to write them up until now.  So this article will be based on some pretty dim recollections.  I suppose that I could just watch all of these again, but, uh, I’m not going to do that.  As movies go, these four were less than fantastic.

So why did I watch them at all?  In theory, there was no need: I’ve been watching the top Skandies movies, and the 2015 version of Fantastic Four came in at, ahem, #297 on the Skandies list.  I’ve also been making my way through the Marvel Cinematic Universe… of which none of these Fantastic Four films is a part.  But in writing up those MCU movies, I’ve name-checked the Fantastic Four over and over again.  After all, the Marvel Uni­verse⁠—though it did soon reach back and rope in comics pub­lished from 1939 to 1961 under the banners of Timely Comics and Atlas Comics⁠—started with Fantastic Four #1.  It’s hard to talk about the history of any Marvel property to come along since then without dating it in relation to the debut of the F.F.  And the importance of the F.F. to the Marvel Universe goes beyond a mere happenstance of chronology.  The competition had been offering up Justice League of America, whose interchangeably bland characters, distinguishable only by the colors of their costumes, made it basically an Oldsmobile dealership in the form of a comic book.  Though publisher Martin Goodman commissioned Fan­tastic Four as a Justice League knock-off, Stan Lee used the book to set forth the template for a very different type of team.  Lee presented readers with superheroes with sufficiently distinct personalities that you didn’t actually need the tails on the speech bubbles to know who was speaking⁠—and whose personalities clashed enough that the members of the team spent more time bickering than fighting the villains.  The Thing in particular was a breakout character: while Spider‑Man went on to become the face of the company, in many ways the Thing was a better calling card for this new approach to superheroes.  The Justice Leaguers were emotionless ciphers; the Thing would often go from morose to irascible to jovial in the space of a single issue.  The Justice Leaguers had no problems apart from figuring out how to stop that month’s baddie, and were virtually worshipped by the masses; the Thing was tormented by his transformation into an orange rock monster who (at least initially) frightened and disgusted the public.  And the Justice Leaguers were from fictional places like Krypton and Paradise Island and Atlantis, and settled in equally fictional places like Metropolis, Midvale, and Gotham City; everything they said sounded like the linguistic equivalent of Wonder Bread.  The Thing was from the Lower East Side and sounded like the middle-aged, blue-collar New Yorkers who made up the Marvel staff.

But while Fantastic Four made the Marvel Universe a big sen­sation in the comics world right out of the gate⁠—the company sold half of what chief competitor DC sold prior to the F.F.’s 1961 debut, but by 1966 had passed DC and never looked back⁠—Marvel lagged far behind DC in making the leap to movie theaters.  As I mentioned a few months ago, DC’s Superman movie from 1978 made $1.15 billion in today’s money, while DC’s Batman movie from 1989 made $1.18 billion, inflation-adjusted.  Meanwhile, I followed Marvel’s attempts to break onto the big screen as covered by its previews magazine, Marvel Age: 

Issue #43, 1986: Howard the Duck.  Budget: $37 million; domestic gross: $16 million; Rotten Tomatoes score: 13% positive.

Issue #72, 1989: The Punisher, starring Dolph Lundgren.  Filmed in Australia.  Budget: $9 million; demoted to direct-to-video; Rotten Tomatoes score: 28% positive.

Issue #85, 1990: Captain America, starring Matt Salinger (son of J.D.).  Filmed in Yugoslavia.  Budget: $3 million; demoted to direct-to-video; Rotten Tomatoes score: 13% positive.

And that brings us to:

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Craig J. Nevius,
Kevin Rock, and Oley Sassone, 1994

If you’ve followed the trend line above, it will probably not surprise you to learn that the budget for this movie clocked in at a million dollars even.  Apparently the story is that German producer Bernd Eichinger had snapped up the film rights to the Fantastic Four in the early 1980s, waiting for the property to get hot enough to land him a big deal.  This did eventually happen!  But he stood to lose those rights if he did not actually make a film by the end of 1992.  So he teamed up with B‑movie impre­sario Roger Corman and, three days before his contract was due to expire, began production on this placeholder.  The result is what you would expect given the backstory.  The Thing is a guy in a rubber suit.  The Invisible Woman’s powers are accomplished either through camera tricks that I was using on our camcorder back in junior high or by having the bad guys say, essentially, “Ow! Someone invisible is beating me up!” Mr. Fantastic’s stretching is depicted by very occasionally showing a glove on a pole pop in from outside the frame to bop a baddie.  And the Human Torch is a literal cartoon.  Some argue that because the movie couldn’t rely on wowing the audience with special effects, it had to rely on storytelling and the thematic strengths of the source material.  But on those scores it actually does worse than it does in the special effects department.  So let’s move on.

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Mark Frost,
Michael France, and Tim Story, 2005

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Turman,
Mark Frost, Don Payne, and Tim Story, 2007

Marvel finally broke through in the movie theaters with 1998’s Blade, which made a domestic gross of $70 million on a $45 million budget, though Blade was a character from Marvel’s 1970s horror line (from Tomb of Dracula, to be specific) and at the time had a pretty tenuous connection to the rest of the Marvel Universe.  But 2000’s X-Men made a domestic gross of $157 million on a $75 million budget, and 2002’s Spider-Man made a domestic gross of $407 million on a $139 million budget, and these were unquestionably core MU properties.  So in 2005 Bernd Eichinger finally got his big F.F. movie, with a budget a hundred times that of the ’94 effort.  It is not a hundred times better.  It may not even be a hundred percent better.  It’s under­standable that the filmmakers would aim for a tone similar to the ’00s Spider-Man movies, given how financially successful they were, but… those movies were painfully hokey.  And much the same is true for the 2005 Fantastic Four and its sequel.  These movies have the feel of sitcom pilots that have been subjected to extensive testing by focus groups⁠—the comedy is certainly better than the sub-Gilligan’s Island TV movie humor in the 1994 film, but in the same way that the Olive Garden is better than a can of Spaghetti-O’s.  And for movies with nine-figure budgets, they feel oddly small-scale.  Two of the big set pieces in the ’05 film are a rescue sequence on the Brooklyn Bridge and a montage of motocross stunts.  Have there been similar set pieces in F.F. comics?  Sure, I guess.  If you had to pick a handful of action sequences to capture what the Fantastic Four is all about, are those the ones you’d choose?  Not a chance.  Even the special effects leave something to be desired.  Again, the stretching is the weakest link: it’s done via CGI this time, but it’s not actually that much more convincing than the pole with the glove on it.  What I don’t get is this: the filmmakers, both on the ’00s films and the 1994 and 2015 versions, take all sorts of liberties with the source material.  All four movies feature Doctor Doom as the chief antagonist, and none of these Dooms resembles the comic book version more than superficially⁠—the 1994 version actually comes the closest on this score.  So why not just, y’know, not use the stretching?

After all, the Fantastic Four is not about the specific super­powers the characters develop.  The First Family in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City has a different power set and is still unmistakably the Fantastic Four in everything but name.  And as the name of the Astro City version suggests, F.F. writers throughout the years have explained that what sets the Fantastic Four apart from other superteams is the fact that they’re not classmates like the original X-Men were, or a silly Elks Lodge like the original Avengers were, but a family.  Capture that, and you’re halfway to a decent F.F. movie.  The other big thing that sets the Fantastic Four apart is that, while they do “fight crime” and even “save the world”, that’s not what they’re about.  They’re adventurers.  Explorers.  A typical F.F. adventure starts with Reed Richards saying, “Hey, gang, I accidentally opened a portal to a new dimension while I was recalibrating the Heisenberg fluctators on my time sled. Let’s go check it out!”  Yes, the F.F. have found themselves pitted against any number of villains over the past six decades, but the classic stretches of their comic were not about fighting bad guys but rather about the creators rolling out wild concept after wild concept⁠—from the Inhumans to Galactus to Wakanda over the span of a few issues.  And this wasn’t just a Lee-and-Kirby thing⁠—in my day, John Byrne and later Walt Simonson captured the spirit of the F.F. and had memorable runs of their own.  So if you’re going to make an F.F. movie, it seems to me that that’s the way to do it.  Send them off on a grand adventure, several years into their career, after their relationships to each other and to the Marvel Universe have already been well established, and let us get our bearings the same way that generations of comic book readers did: by picking it up as we go.  Don’t waste time with a story as comparatively dull as their origin.