Marvel Studios recently announced that Jon Watts, best known for helming the MCU’s Spider-Man movies, has been tapped to direct the MCU Fantastic Four reboot. This will mark the first time that a Fantastic Four movie has been made because the producer actually wanted to tell their story on the screen and not because the rights option was about to expire. Kevin Feige has made it abundantly clear that he’s as big a Fantastic Four fan as anyone and he’s determined to give Marvel’s first family the big-screen treatment they deserve.
Hiring Watts is a good start, because the character-driven set pieces and resonant emotional scenes in his Spidey movies have proven he can pull it off, but the filmmaker should look to a different Marvel franchise for inspiration in bringing the Fantastic Four to the screen. Ultimately, the key to making the Fantastic Four characters work on-screen is selling the family dynamic, which James Gunn has nailed with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.
Much like the Guardians, the Fantastic Four are much more than just a team of superheroes – they’re a family. But it’s not a traditional nuclear family; it’s a “found” family. Johnny and Sue are siblings, Sue and Reed are in love, Reed and Ben are childhood friends, and Ben and Johnny have a love/hate bickering back-and-forth. Just as Gunn has forged strong bonds between all the Guardians throughout the team’s initial two outings, Watts will need to define the relationships between the members of the Fantastic Four in this new reboot. The previous movies have tried to force in a love triangle between Reed, Sue, and Doctor Doom – which never happened in the comics (although they did have a love triangle with Namor) – and none of them have been able to make it work. The new Fantastic Four movie should keep its story focused on turning the team into a family; if it’s done well, that’ll be interesting enough. The Incredibles is a better Fantastic Four movie than any of the official ones because at its heart, it’s a story about a family.
Casting will obviously be crucial to creating this family dynamic. Choosing the right actors for a team movie is a particularly daunting task, because each actor has to not only embody their individual role, but also share tangible on-screen chemistry with all their co-stars. Watts’ Fantastic Four movie will be safe in this department, because Marvel’s go-to casting wizard Sarah Finn – who assembled the Guardians and also cast the rest of the Avengers – is on the case. Gunn initially rejected Chris Pratt when Finn mentioned his name, because the director just knew him as the Parks and Rec guy, but she implored him to give Pratt a chance and the rest is history. Pratt’s lovability and bubbly energy anchor the Guardians movies, whether he’s sharing palpable romantic tension with Zoe Saldana or playing the straight man opposite Dave Bautista’s deadpan absurdity, and Finn will need to find two actors who are equally fit to anchor the Fantastic Four franchise as Reed and Sue. The most popular fan casting is John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, which would certainly check off the chemistry box because they’re actually married.
Another significant factor in pulling off a successful Fantastic Four movie is getting the tone right. Tim Story’s Fantastic Four movies were little more than agreeable family-friendly blockbusters, but they came much closer to replicating the fun, lighthearted tone of the comics than the 2015 reboot Fant4stic. Josh Trank’s movie, which was heavily reshot and recut by the studio, is essentially two movies: in its first half, it tells the characters’ origin story as a Cronenberg-esque body horror movie; then, in its second half, it skips past all the character development with a one-year time jump and morphs into a gritty, Batman Begins-influenced, pseudo-realistic comic book movie. Neither of these tones work, because Fantastic Four stories don’t usually take themselves seriously – their powers (and their name) make that obvious. The dark tone of Fant4stic was reminiscent of Man of Steel and The Amazing Spider-Man as a needlessly gritty post-Dark Knight update of a traditionally light, optimistic comic book property.
James Gunn always sticks the landing with the Guardians movies’ emotional moments, like the death of the original Groot or Yondu’s sacrifice to save Quill, but the movies don’t take themselves too seriously. There’s always a joke around the corner, even in life-threatening situations, and the characters’ snappy interplay is similar to that of the Always Sunny gang. The balance of comedy and drama in the Guardians movies would be right at home in a Fantastic Four movie.
The Fantastic Four aren’t exactly like the Guardians by any stretch. Deep down, the Guardians are inherently bad people who want to become good. The Fantastic Four are all basically decent people who strive to do the right thing. Johnny’s a troublemaker, but his biggest flaw is that he’s arrogant; Rocket’s biggest flaw is that he’s a murderer. These are very different stories with very different characters. Still, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies might make for a useful tonal jumping-off point for translating the Fantastic Four into the already-established world of the MCU.