Jeremy Slater’s 2012 draft resembles the film closely at first:
Reed and Ben are young friends working together on a science fair project that teleports matter… elsewhere. In the script, Reed first teleports a toy car during his presentation to the fair’s judges which he later sees again when the team finally make it to the Negative Zone later.
- The film takes the time to establish that Ben Grimm is Reed’s enforcer—keeping him safe from bullies.
Reed is invited to the Baxter Building as part of a graduate science internship. There, he meets Sue Storm and Victor Von Doom. Victor takes the nerdy Reed out to parties where he falls for Sue but Victor is secretly feeding Reed’s research to spies from his Eastern European homeland Latveria.
In the Baxter Building, Dr. Harvey Elder who is creating artificial life in the biolab with Sue, nicknamed the “Moloids.”
Meanwhile, Ben is saddened that he no longer hears from Reed. He decides to enlist in the army.
When the Baxter Building executive board (with Drs. Elder, Lumpkin, and others) refuses to allow Reed and Victor to use the Quantum Gate they have built to enter the Negative Zone, the two choose to use it in the dead of night with Sue’s help.
- Reed calls in Ben, the person he trusts the most, even if their relationship is strained at the moment.
- Sue calls her brother Johnny in to help at the last minute because they have no one else to turn to.
In the script the Quantum Gate is very much that - a rip in space through which a module is passed on a big hydraulic arm.
Reed promises Ben that he’ll be the first human to step foot on the other side of the portal as Sue monitors the mission with Johnny at the controls from this side of the portal. But when the team gets through to the Negative Zone, Doom pushes Ben aside and puts the first footprint in the dust.
On the other side, they find an alien city full of skeletons—non-human— that have been killed in some recent cataclysm. As the team explores the ruins, they come upon an amphitheater full of corpses and something else. Something huge…
GALACTUS
The being spots the three explorers and chases after them. He shoots Dark Matter out of his hands, enveloping and seemingly killing Victor. Reed and Ben make it to the module but it’s malfunctioning—on the other side of the portal, Sue is working feverishly to fix the circuitry. Galactus nears as she finally fixes the machine, and he blasts the module with Dark Matter which carries over through the Quantum Gate. There’s a reaction and the entire team— the two in the module and the two in the lab— are pelted with cosmic rays!
We watch the team as they awake in the wreckage— Johnny is on fire, screaming. Ben is trapped in stone. Sue’s skin on her face disappearing to reveal her musculature.
Four Years Later.
Johnny Storm is a reality show star, although his show is dipping in the ratings. Sue is still at the Baxter Building and she’s using her invisibility powers to look inside of patients suffering from serious cancers. Dr. Elder wants her to come work on the Moloid program, but Sue won’t— she thinks it’ll be weaponized.
Ben Grimm has been weaponized, working with the military as a deadly asset. He is kept locked up at a military base between missions. Reed, meanwhile, is in hiding in Jakarta, taking the blame for the destruction wrought in the Baxter Building. He’s built himself a HERBIE robot and he’s trying to sell his plans for the FantastiCar to Toyota. They think the idea is good but that running it on a nuclear reactor shows no regard for safety— Reed’s infamous hallmark.
In Latveria, the government has created their own Quantum Gate using the information Victor fed them years ago. They send a team through and the module returns splattered in blood, containing only one occupant: a Victor Von Doom. He’s made now entirely of Dark Matter and quickly dispatches everyone around him, using shape-changing abilities and shooting electrified dark matter from his hands. Within minutes he has slaughtered Latveria’s ruling elite and taken over the country.
Back in the US, Sue and Ben (in classic trench coat and a fedora) meet for pizza. He tells her he’s made his peace with being a monster. What he hates is that Reed abandoned him. Sue, it turns out, has been staying at the Baxter Building because she has been trying to cure Ben, using her cancer research. It’s not working…
In Indonesia. Reed is attacked by thugs armed with futuristic weapons—weapons based on his own designs. He deduces that this has to be Victor; that somehow he survived and is after his old friends. Reed tries to call Sue to warn the others, but he can’t get her on the phone so he whips out a FantastiCar prototype, loads up HERBIE, and begins a flight across the ocean.
At the same time thugs - called Shock Troopers in the script - assault the Baxter Building. Johnny happens to be there with a camera crew trying to get Sue to join him on the show to spike ratings. In the chaos that ensues, Dr. Elder gets Moloid juice on him and is transformed into Mole Man, while Shock Troopers inject a Moloid with Dark Matter.
Sue and Johnny stop the Shock Troopers when Reed shows up too late to warn them. But not too late to see that injected Moloid, now giant, burst out of the ground. Ben, who happens to be nearby looking at puppies in a pet shop window, hears the commotion and runs over.
The team engage the giant Moloid, as seen on the cover of Fantastic Four #1, in a fight that is both exciting and funny. Ben gets swallowed and tries to fight his way out—when he finally gets to the Moloid’s mouth, he sees that Reed has slingshotted a bus at the creature and Johnny has set it on fire and it is heading right towards the mouth - and Ben.
The rest of the script has the team coming together to go to Latveria, now the center of an international incident because Victor has built a giant Dark Energy cannon. He intends to use it to destroy Galactus. It is revealed that Victor’s only chance at survival in the Negative Zone was to act as Galactus’ herald and help him find a new world to consume: Earth. But Von Doom intends to destroy the Destroyer before that can happen.
The team use their powers in more ways in the script, and Sue especially gets a lot to do.
- She helps Reed escape from government captivity after the Moloid battle.
- She’s able to create a force shield that reduces wind resistance on the FantastiCar and allows it to reach incredible speeds.
- Reed uses his powers to become a living airbag in a crash and he survives a grenade attack.
The final battle is in Latveria but it is revealed that the Doom there is just a Dark Matter construct (a Doombot of sorts). In actuality, Victor is actually physically attached to the planet in the Negative Zone and has sent tendrils of his being to Earth.
In the end, Reed’s biggest contribution to the final fight is HERBIE who helps to turn the tides.
As the film closes, Doom is trapped in the Negative Zone. The Fantastic Four inform the US government that Galactus is coming. To defeat this coming menace, Baxter Building is rechristened as the team’s home base and a school for the next generation of young geniuses.
