What tone should this new franchise go for?

[KRYPTON INC.]

The tone? Like the best ST:TNG eps with a plot that's action adventure driven and posts some philosophical questions about life the universe and everything. The Baxter Building is the epicenter of tech and research on the East Coast. None of this Reed is an uncool nerd crap. He's handsome, witty, rich and respected. He holds court at the BB with the likes of Michio Kaku and N.D. Tyson, who come to pick his brain about various things. He's Tony Stark without the *****ieness. The sense is that Reed is often called in by the Executive branch to handle things beyond the scope of the CIA/FBI, NASA and NSA. I stress "called in". There's no strong arming by a general In this film. Sue should not be a scientist, but she is smart and cunning. She handles Reed's schedule and keeps the whole operation afloat. She grounds Reed in the everyday and runs the FF's philanthropic enterprises. Without her, the everything would fall apart. Ben is as he's always been. Noble yet tortured. Yet he's the most accessible of the 4. He's like the quintessential NYC celeb in some ways. People and media outlets wait around the Baxter Building just to catch a glimpse of him, even if it's for morbid curiousity. He's on a first name basis with every sidewalk food vendor in midtown, and tries to maintain as normal a life as he can, including wearing normal clothing, sometimes to humorous affect. Johnny is a kid, 17-20 tops. He's a Justin Beiber type teen heart throb, and to say that strokes his ego is an understatement. He's doesn't act stupid, but he is flippant. There is a difference between the two. He hassles Ben because he feels for the big lug. So when Ben is down he razzes him and plays pranks to take his mind off things, not because he is cruel, but because as a young and immature person he has nothing else in his emotional toolbox yet. To sum up, overall, the FF should be a pocket of Kennedy era 60's cool in a 21st century world.

I'm open to Trank's vision for now, until I see a trailer. I DO wish this is what we were getting.

 

[Gabe99]

Miles Teller on What Appealed to Him About The Fantastic Four Reboot
The Divergent star will play Reed Richards in the Fox film.

Teller continued, "I was joking around about a year ago, 'I guess I'll be playing a supehero soon' because that's just the world that we're in, but I think a lot of times it just looks like Hollywood actors in Halloween costumes, you know? And I think what we're going to do with Fantastic Four is going to be very grounded and it made sense to me."

"When I read the script, I didn't feel like I was reading this larger-than-life, incredible supehero tale," he explained. "These are all very human people that end up having to become I guess what is known as the Fantastic Four. So for me it was just a really good story and gives me an opportunity to play something different from my own skin. It's a proper character and that's my favorite stuff to do."

From George Koury's The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore:
Page 110:

The Stuff that makes Watchmen radical is not really the stuff that's in the plot. It's not dark treatments of super-heroes--I mean, that had been done before. i mean you could even say that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were going for a gritty, darker treatment of the super-heroes back in 1961 with the Fantastic Four. More shadows in the artwork, kind of depressed slum dwellings in the backgrounds, more realistic dialogue and character interaction.

Alan Moore

 

[Hordakfan]

There actually is, but i guess they're just going to ignore the greatness that is Jack Kirby's run on Fantastic Four. I enjoyed Ultimate FF, i just have a problem with the statement that you can't make a "faithful" film to the heart of the original FF comics, they were creative and crazy, but had something new to comics at the time and often ignored, realism in the characters, not shallow realism that doesn't let you be creative and wants everything edgy and dark nowadays.

I think this one is a better read:

http://zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/index.html

Every Studio has now realized (except maybe WB. ) that dark and gritty movies need a great script and direction to be successful (not all movies can become SkyFall and TDK), but making entertaining movies that kids and families can enjoy (read full of jokes) will earn them boat loads of money with little effort.

Plus, if kids love the movie it will help them sell Toys, merchandise.

Do you think it works for Punisher and Batman with the gritty dark tone and not for FF?

I think it could be like X-Men franchise in some ways.

 

[Airwings]

Half Days of Future Past, half Avengers

 

[Red Mask]

The Fantastic Four are basically more qualified than the X-Files in solving mysteries and proving them to the public.

 

[Jordacar]

It kinda cracks me up watching Kinberg and Trank and the others try and sell this whole "grounded and gritty" song-and-dance, whereas if Marvel was making it they could just go "You know Avengers? It's like that. Next question."

 

[Gabe99]

The Four: Could This Twisted Vision Be The Inspiration For Fox’s New Fantastic Four Movie?

The production has been so secretive that nobody outside of the making of Fox’s new take on the Fantastic Four knows exactly what the flick is going to look like or be about, but it’s possible that we’ve already got a blueprint for the Four’s reboot. If you know where to look, that is.

With its X-Men movie franchise now appearing to turn out quality pictures, Fox is looking to make Marvel’s Fantastic Four into an equally bankable property. There hasn’t been much leaked from the production, and that has fans of the Fantastic Four worried.

Adding to those worries have been some of the things people affiliated with the film have said about the new Fantastic Four reboot. For one, the new FF movie will apparently have Johnny and Sue Storm as adopted siblings rather than blood relations, a move that has some fans howling.

Add to that some commentary from Miles Teller, who plays Reed Richards, saying that the story will be told “in a different way,” without a “kitschy, overly comic-book world,” and your average Fantastic Four fan probably just fainted. And that’s not even mentioning Michael B. Jordan’s recent remarks about the Four all in “containment suits” in what he classified as a “gritty film.”

So what could Fox possibly be crafting for a new take on Marvel’s Fantastic Four? It might be the case that the “gritty” nature of the Four was already set out in another comic, but not a Marvel comic.

Starting back in 1999, Wildstorm comics began publishing Planetary. We won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that Planetary was an amazing journey through the history of comics, expertly written by noted internet madman Warren Ellis and beautifully illustrated by John Cassaday. If you haven’t read it already, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

The main villains in Planetary are a group of former adventurers who went into space, encountered a portal between universes, and returned from their journey much changed. They’re known as the Four.

The leader of the Four is Randal Dowling, creator of Science City Zero. A brilliant scientist, Dowling comes up with the plan to launch the Four into space, and he comes back with the ability to “stretch” his mind, allowing him to steal information from others.

Next up is Kim Süskind, daughter of a Nazi rocket scientist and Dowling’s lover. Kim is able to turn herself invisible and project invisible force fields.

Alongside those two, there’s William Leather, a hothead who comes back from the Four’s journey with the ability to project a fire-like energy from his body, as well as some other super skills.

Finally, there’s Jacob Greene, the pilot who flew the mission that took the Four into space. Greene faired worst of all of the Four, mutating into an incredibly durable but hideously disfigured monster.

So, a stretchy guy, a woman that turns invisible, a hothead fire guy, and a tough, rocky monster. Sound familiar? They should; the Four were, of course, based on Marvel’s Fantastic Four, mimicking the powers of Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing.

What does all this have to do with Fox’s Fantastic Four reboot? Well, think back to what Jordan said about “containment suits” and a “gritty” take on the Fantastic Four. Jordan also had a peculiar way of referring to the Fantastic Four’s fantastic abilities.

“We’re more or less a bunch of kids that had an accident,” Jordan said to MTV News back in July, “and we have disabilities now that we have to cope with, and try to find a life afterwards – try to be as normal as we can.”

“Disabilities,” eh? One thing about the way that the Four are portrayed in Planetary is that they’re not all totally happy with their powers. Süskind can turn invisible, sure, but she also loses the ability to see – because the light isn’t absorbed by her eyes, because they’re transparent, because science! – unless she uses special goggles. Greene, of course, is near indestructible, but so deformed that he can’t live among people.

It’s possible that the more “grounded” approach Fox keeps talking about for the new Fantastic Four could be rooted in the twisted funhouse mirror version seen in Ellis’ Planetary. Not that Jordan, Mara, et al would be villains, per se, but that their powers won’t be exactly the way fans are expecting them to be having read the comics.

And that could be a good thing, because – frankly – the Fantastic Four are kind of silly. That shows through in the rather lackluster reception the two previous Fantastic Four films got; neither was a bomb, but nobody has been clamoring for Michael Chiklis to put his Thing costume back on, eh?

Of course, this is all just conjecture, as nobody knows what the Fantastic Four will look like when they take the screen late next summer. Still, taking a page from some other comics and avoiding the happy-go-lucky, shiny look of the previous films could be exactly what Fox needs to do to turn the Four into a household name.