FILM · 2015 · USA
Fantastic Four
115 archived facts 7 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
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In a tweet posted on August 6, 2015 and quickly deleted, Josh Trank said: "A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would've received great reviews. You'll probably never see it. That's reality though." After seeing that version, the studio mandated extensive reshoots. Kate Mara's new scenes are easy to spot because she cut her hair and wore a blonde wig, and Miles Teller had a beard that appeared and disappeared between shoots. Box office analysts said Trank's ill-advised tweet may have cost 20th Century Fox $10 million in opening-weekend ticket sales.
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Initially, Marvel Studios offered to give 20th Century Fox an extension on rebooting Daredevil in exchange for the Fantastic Four film rights, along with characters that would expand the cosmic universe tied to the brand (Galactus, Silver Surfer, Uatu the Watcher, Annihilus, the Skrulls and the Badoon, among others), or at least just the cosmic characters. Fox refused to accept the offers, later lost the Daredevil rights and allowed Marvel's Daredevil (2015) to be made. The cosmic characters ultimately went unused, and the rights returned to Marvel after Disney's acquisition of Fox.
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The origin of the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom (a laboratory experiment involving a portal to another dimension goes wrong, and all five are mutated by the radiation from the experiment) is based on their "Ultimate Marvel" origins. In the classic Marvel origins, the Four were exposed to radiation while aboard a rocket orbiting Earth, and Doom was disfigured by an unrelated laboratory accident.
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Josh Trank fought for Miles Teller to get the role of Reed Richards despite the studios' wishes, but the two men nearly came to blows on set. Although Trank did not want her for the role, the studios forced Kate Mara into the part of Sue Storm; as a result, he treated Mara harshly and bullied her during the shoot.
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The draft script written by Josh Trank and Jeremy Slater differed from the final film in many ways: * The original draft's first act is as long as the final film's first two-thirds. * The original script is closer in tone to the MCU. * The script includes the origins of the Fantastic Four, Doctor Doom, Galactus, Mole Man, the robot Herbie and the FantastiCar. * Ben still has Reed's power and protects him from bullies. This makes Reed's decision to bring Ben along on the trip to the Negative Zone more meaningful. * Reed goes to the Baxter Building as part of a science scholarship; there he meets Sue, who works with Dr. Elder, who has the most advanced technology in the field of biology, producing "moloids." Reed also meets Victor Von Doom, who takes nerdy Reed to parties and meets and falls in love with Sue. Meanwhile Ben is upset that Reed stopped looking for him and makes a choice; he skips college and enlists in the army. * There is no older Dr. Storm character. Sue calls her brother Johnny as a last resort when she is about to go to the Negative Zone. * Victor Von Doom is actually a spy for his homeland of Latveria and leaks Reed's research to them. * When the team uses the Quantum Gate, it is because their school will not let them use it, which leads the team to use it in the dark of night. Reed calls Ben, the person he trusts most even if their relationship is strained. Sue stays behind, helping her man with the controls on this side of the portal. Ben is promised he will be the first human to set foot on the other side of the portal. * When they enter the Negative Zone they find an alien city whose entire population is dead. They also find their destroyer: Galactus. * Galactus apparently kills Victor with Dark Matter, while Reed and Ben reach the module but the module does not work; on the other side of the portal, Sue works frantically to repair the circuits that will not let the module return home. As Sue finally repairs the machine, Galactus approaches and blows up the module with Dark Matter - but the Dark Matter hits the Quantum Gate and creates a reaction, and the whole team (the two in the module and the two in the lab) are caught up in some kind of cosmic frenzy. * The scene where the team wakes up in the wreckage resembles the scene where Johnny is burning, screaming, and Ben is trapped in stone. But Sue's condition is even more pronounced; the skin on her face disappears and her muscles are visible. * The script jumps forward four years instead of one; Johnny becomes a reality TV star, Sue returns to the medical profession and uses her invisibility powers to look inside seriously ill cancer patients (Dr. Elder wants her to come and work on the Moloid program but Sue does not want to - she thinks it will be turned into a weapon), Reed is in hiding because he blames himself for the destruction at the Baxter Building, and there he builds a Herbie robot while trying to sell the FantastiCar to Toyota. And Ben works for the army. * Meanwhile Latveria creates its own Quantum Gate thanks to the information Victor sent. They send a team. But only Doom returns and seizes the country with his powers and now acts as Galactus's herald. * Sue tries to use her cancer research to cure Ben but it does not work. * Victor's men, called the Raid Squad and armed with futuristic weapons, attack Reed in Indonesia. Realizing the weapons are based on his own designs, Reed realizes it must be Victor's doing and that he is still alive. Unable to contact Sue, he uses a FantastiCar and flies to the Baxter Building, bringing Herbie with him. At the same time, the Raid Squad attacks Sue and Johnny at the Baxter Building. During the fight, Dr. Elder accidentally turns into Mole Man. * While Johnny and Sue fight the soldiers, a Moloid comes into contact with dark matter and turns into a giant creature. When Reed finally arrives, the giant creature bursts from the ground. Ben, who is nearby looking at puppies in a pet shop window, hears the commotion and runs there. The team attacks the giant Moloid and the fight ends with Ben being swallowed and trying to fight his way out; when he finally reaches the Moloids' mouth, he sees Reed slingshot a bus at the creature and Johnny set it on fire, and the bus heads straight for the mouth and Ben. * For the rest of the script, the team comes together to go to Latveria, which is now the center of an international incident because Victor is building a giant ball of Dark Energy. They plan to use it to destroy Galactus; apparently Victor's only chance to survive in the Negative Zone was to act as Galactus's herald and help him find a new world to feed on, Earth. But Von Doom plans to destroy the Destroyer before this happens. * In the script the team uses their powers in more ways, and Sue in particular has a lot to do. After the Moloid battle she helps Reed escape government captivity and can create a force shield that reduces the FantastiCar's wind resistance and lets it reach incredible speeds. Reed uses his powers to turn into a living airbag during a collision, survives a grenade attack, and in the end his biggest contribution to the final fight is Herbie. * The final battle is in Latveria, but the shape-shifting Doom turns out to be a Doombot; Victor is actually physically bound to the planet in the Negative Zone and sent branches of his existence to Earth. The film ends with him trapped in the Negative Zone, the Fantastic Four telling the government that Galactus is coming, and the Baxter Building being reorganized as their main base and a school for gifted children who could help defeat the coming Galactus threat. This version of the script was rejected by 20th Century Fox on the grounds that it would be too expensive, so they hired Simon Kinberg to rewrite the film.
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Doctor Doom in this film is based on the Ultimate Marvel version (a computer programmer who acquires a metal coating) and includes elements from the Ultimate Marvel versions of Annihilus (a being with metallic skin and green eyes), Molecule Man (a nearly powerful but unstable character) and the Living Planet Ego (a being that consumes worlds).
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In the "Ultimate Fantastic Four" comics on which this film is based, Ben Grimm (The Thing) and Susan Storm (Invisible Woman) married. (In the original version, Susan married Reed Richards.) In an interesting example of life imitating art, the stars of this film, Jamie Bell (Ben Grimm) and Kate Mara (Susan Storm), became engaged in 2017.
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The visual effects company OTOY, hired to work on the film, was reported to have been overwhelmed by the project and to have had to deal with a generally unresponsive and erratic Josh Trank, who demanded that the Thing's appearance and size change between certain shots. A number of visual effects sequences, such as a scene in which the Thing fights rebels in the Middle East, were apparently cut because 20th Century Fox did not provide the small company with enough funding to complete them. Ironically, the reason they hired OTOY was to save money; the reliance on the company and the cost of reshoots ultimately made the whole affair even more expensive.
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The Fantasticar, originally the Fantastic Four's personal vehicle, was to appear in the film: Reed and Johnny would have combined their abilities to build a car fitted with a quantum gate to take the Four to the Negative Zone. This was scrapped because of costs, and in the final film the Four follow closely behind Doom into the Zone.
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In May 2020, Josh Trank acknowledged the problems he had on Fantastic Four. "What I was trying to do with Fantastic Four was so arrogant for somebody to try to do with it, that didn't really grasp their own skills as a filmmaker yet," he told The Hollywood Reporter. He also added that he is not interested in releasing a "Trank Cut," because there is no need for one.
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In 2017 the Murdoch family chose to sell 21st Century Fox's film and television entertainment assets, a move that drew bids from both Comcast and The Walt Disney Company. Disney won with a $71.3 billion offer and closed the deal in March 2019. As a result, Disney would come to own Fox-produced Marvel films and, through its ownership of 20th Century Fox, acquired the film rights to both the Fantastic Four and X-Men film series. Disney transferred the film rights to Marvel Studios, and the studio is now preparing a reboot of Fantastic Four.
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After Josh Trank objected to 20th Century Fox's original cut, he was essentially stripped of all directorial authority. The studio hired Stephen E. Rivkin to re-edit the film and ordered extensive rewrites and reshoots to match his own version. Trank said Rivkin was the "de facto director." The reshoots were also heavily overseen by producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker.
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Because the producers felt he had nothing to do with his comic book counterpart, the character Harvey Elder, also known as Mole Man in the comics, was renamed Harvey Allen in post-production. The film's depiction of Allen is based on Harvey Elder (a scientist and a contemporary of Dr Franklin Storm) and on the Marvel "Ultimate" version of Willie Lumpkin (a government agent who manages the team).
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The film was shown to critics only two days before its premiere in the United States. However, it had been scheduled to open in many territories before then, with no critic screenings in those regions either. International premieres were subsequently pushed back to the United States premiere, meaning the film was in effect shown to critics only at the eleventh hour, at which point it might not have been shown to them at all. The online embargo lasted until two days before the premiere date, while the print embargo lasted until the premiere date.
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The odds were against the film's original June 19 release date. It would have been squeezed between three major blockbusters: Jurassic World (2015) the previous weekend, Inside Out (2015) the same weekend, and Ted 2 (2015) the following weekend. 20th Century Fox noticed the problem and moved the premiere date back two months, putting it up against Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015). Unfortunately, once bad word of mouth emerged, the move did the film no good, and it finished behind Rogue Nation in its opening weekend. It was the first Fantastic Four film not to open at number 1 since Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011), and the first Marvel film not to open at number 1.
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Alexander Lozano's concept art revealed that there were plans for Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell to reprise their roles in a cameo in Deadpool 2 (2018). These plans were cancelled after director Tim Miller left the sequel over creative differences and was replaced by David Leitch.
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Ironically, although Jamie Bell and Kate Mara are now a married couple, their characters never have a single direct exchange of dialogue throughout the entire film. The only time Ben Grimm and Susan Storm speak to each other is at the end of the film, and even then they are speaking not only to each other but also to the rest of the group.
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In the film, Victor's quantum attack on Earth resembles a drill and results in a giant sinkhole with a waterfall pouring into it. Parts of the film were shot in Louisiana, where an oil drilling accident at Lake Peigneur in 1980 caused the tallest waterfall in the Mississippi River valley (estimated at over 60 meters) to flow into a whirlpool.
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Miles Teller took on the role of Reed Richards in this film. He also appeared alongside Brie Larson, who plays the Marvel superhero Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, in The Spectacular Now (2013). He also appeared alongside Melissa Benoist, who would go on to play TV's Supergirl, in Whiplash (2014).
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