Looking at the numbers, I strongly disagree. The last FF film did (per Box Office Mojo) $289 million worldwide. Though I can see the FF film treading water with the reboot like the Hulk films, the box office ceiling is probably close to FOX's highly regarded X-Men sorta-reboot XM:FC, or $350 million.
The last FF film (again, per BOM) cost $130 million and looked terrible. XM: FC cost $160 million, and if you look at rising costs along with the more extensive CGI required to put all four members onscreen doing more than just sitting around, and the cost floor is around $175 million.
Have you addressed how I discredited the notion that the last FF film's cost is worth mentioning. The first FF film cost 100 Million and did not look terrible, so what sense does it make to use the last one as your standard of money to quality? Prometheus cost 130M and looked great. Chronicle, Skylnie, Paul, and Ted cost less than 50M and all looked great - and none of these were just sitting around, either.
So what justification do you have for bringing up the budget to quality ratio of the last FF film? How could that possibly relate to today's CGI under Trank, which has LOWER cost, or else movies like Chronicle, Paul, Ted and Skyline could not exist.
Your example is irrelevant, in regards to the time, in regards to the director. The fact that you think that CGI costs are rising despite clear proof of the opposite shows the credibility of your research. All my numbers are from BOM as well, I just looked into more movies than you did.
So if we assume FOX gets 50% of the worldwide box office (a high estimate) and a director with one film under his belt keeps the costs under control, the film doesn't get swallowed up in the 2015 hype, and overcomes the challenging release date (56 days before A:AOU), than FOX may be able to break even on an FF reboot. If that's FOX's best case scenario, and I believe it is, then their best play is to give up the FF and put their money into expanding the X Universe.
Just FYI: Release dates two months away don't affect box office. Box office is affected when a big movie comes out and causes a large 2nd or 3rd week drop in a movie's sales. By the time A:AOU comes out, the drop effect will be long gone. No one is going to say "I can't see FF, I need to save my 12 dollars for May!" A:AOU doesn't challenge FF at all. If anything, the fact that the final trailer may be out when FF hits theaters may actually cause
more people to go see FF.
So, you haven't explained why the last FF film is relevant, you haven't explained why A:AOU is relevant (other than potentially helping FF). The last thing you haven't explained is how Josh Trank only having one film out hurts him - especially in the department of keeping costs down. That's what he's famous for. "He's only had one film, he's only had one film." So!? If a director knocks it out of the park on their first film... just imagine what they'll do with their second one! Name another great director who's first film did so well. Even Chris Nolan did Following before he did Momento.
I've also explained why putting these characters on screen is not more expensive. Like other superheroes, they generally show their powers when learning to use them and in action scenes. They are not CGI intensive heroes, with the possible exception of Thing. Further, there's only four of them, and most importantly, they don't do a lot of smashing and working in urban areas. The expensive work of shooting on closed city streets and simulating lots of urban destruction is pretty much moot with the FF, aside from that trademark fight with that giant mole monster. So a soaring budget with a huge setpiece in downtown Cleveland or simulating a destroyed Metropolis just aren't necessities. Hiring big name actors isn't a big thing either. Plus, while Thing and Mr. Fantastic could potentially be more expensive, Invisible Woman and Human Torch are much less so, balancing out the cost, really. Again, doing Human Torch and Invisible Woman can be done effectively by an youtuber for $100 bucks, this implies that by spending $1M bucks it could be done on a professional "done right" level for ten times longer. Suuuuper cheap. Depending on how this new checkerboard mo-cap technology is going, even Thing might not be nearly as expensive as one might think... especially if one is good with keeping costs down, like Trank.
