Fantastic Four reboot-- Casting, Rumors, Pix, ect;

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by Turtletrekker, Dec 8, 2012.

  1. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Yes, that may be exactly what I want. For something that fanciful, it's important to ground it, to resist the tendency to make it broad and goofy. That's what Richard Donner did in Superman: The Movie, at least with the directing if not the story. Scriptwise, it's very fanciful and Silver-Agey, and the performances are kind of broad, but he shot it in as naturalistic a way as he could, working against the cartooniness of the material to give it balance and make it easier to buy into. The worst thing to do with something like FF is to give in to the inherent silliness of the premise -- that way lies camp and self-mockery, and audiences wouldn't engage with that. What made the FF work in comics was that Lee and Kirby balanced the insanity of the premise with more grounded, relatable characterizations.

    After all, the characters' powers speak for themselves. They're extreme enough that they don't have to be showcased in a broad way. It's fine with me to approach their presentation more naturalistically.


    Except there's never been any chance that the X-Men films and the MCU could be compatible. In the MCU, people with superpowers were rare until recent years -- basically just Captain America and the Hulk (and related characters), as far as anyone knew. In the X-Men universe, mutants have been known about for many years.


    Judging from Internet fandom's posts, every upcoming movie is a complete cluster of asterisks. Fandom could take a quote saying "Our writer did a brilliant script and all the cast gave the performances of their lives" and see it as conclusive proof that the film was going to be the worst movie in history.


    We don't know that wasn't true of the old continuity. Mutants were never portrayed as a secret; the first movie basically opens with a Congressional hearing about the growing scourge of mutants, so clearly the public was already aware of them. True, it's implied there that their outing was relatively recent, but that's not certain, especially when you consider that Singer has always approached the series as a gay-rights allegory. The Stonewall riots were in 1969, but it wasn't until decades later that we got Congressional and executive actions regarding gays in the military or gay marriage.



    Now, that I'm not crazy about. Verisimilitude is fine, but found footage is a contrived genre at best, and is often an excuse for deliberately poor cinematography.
     
  2. Dream

    Dream Admiral Admiral

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  3. RJDiogenes

    RJDiogenes Idealistic Cynic and Canon Champion Premium Member

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    They should just release the Roger Corman movie. :rommie:
     
  4. JoeZhang

    JoeZhang Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Unless I've missed it - absolutely no photos leaked of any of the filming? Nothing at all?
     
  5. Mr. Adventure

    Mr. Adventure Fleet Admiral Admiral

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  6. Captaindemotion

    Captaindemotion Admiral Admiral

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    There doesn't seem to have. Nearest there was was that photo purporting to be The Thing (which, as I said before, I think is real, as other sites were asked to pull it). But even that was a model of some sort, not someone on set.

    JJ Abrams would be impressed.
     
  7. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    That's what they're doing. The new cast is being digitally inserted into the Corman film.
     
  8. RJDiogenes

    RJDiogenes Idealistic Cynic and Canon Champion Premium Member

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    That explains the lack of pictures from the set, anyway.
     
  9. Mr. Adventure

    Mr. Adventure Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Since this is going to be found footage style no one found it remarkable that these four young people were being filmed walking through the woods.
     
  10. Mr Light

    Mr Light Admiral Admiral

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    If they are actually doing found footage, I'm sure Reed has little floating cameras to record the scientific experiment he's doing that will result in them getting powers.
     
  11. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    In Ultimate Fantastic Four they got there powers from trying to invent a matter transporter using the Negative Zone as a shuntspace... By the end Reed Richards had gone insane and tried to destroy/takeover the Earth, which is when Ben Grimm, no longer a massive orange Golem, made his move on Sue, and she went for it.

    The coolest thing I took from Ultimate Fantastic Four, other than the Marvel Zombies Crossover obviously, was that Reeds intellect (Increased intellect after the event that gave them powers.) comes from his ability to stretch the meat of his brain, expending and contracting portions to increase the size of portions responsible for particular modes of thought, or decrease the distance between the neurons between his ears.
     
  12. RJDiogenes

    RJDiogenes Idealistic Cynic and Canon Champion Premium Member

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    I was thinking that. Drones are trendy now.
     
  13. Doctorwhovian

    Doctorwhovian Fleet Captain

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    You know, in a way this does seem a bit true to the roots of the team-that is, the first two Lee and Kirby issues where people sort of feared the FF and they were in plain clothes (Thing was also super lumpy, and the Human Torch was more 'flamy' without the human form outline). However issue #3-forward pretty much had them in the classic blue/black uniforms and established as heroes.
     
  14. Serveaux

    Serveaux Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    The beginnings of the so-called "Marvel Universe" displayed at least a cordial dislike for the old style of "long-john" superhero comics - the FF were grounded in the science fiction/monster comics of the 1950s (Byrne even did a wonderful pastiche of one of those, involving Reed, Sue and Ben in an old "monstrous space invader" story set before their rocket ride) and Spider-Man was an one-off joke about how kitschy such characters were.
     
  15. Doctorwhovian

    Doctorwhovian Fleet Captain

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    Yeah-Amazing Fantasy #15 is actually quite a dark story, and even in his own title for a while Spider-Man is quite self-centered before becoming the hero we know.


    Were there plans to launch Spider-Man into an ongoing anyway, or just based on the success of AF? There's a caption or something in that issue that says something about "The new Amazing".
     
  16. Serveaux

    Serveaux Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    Oh, by the time the story was ready to publish I'm sure that the potential of the character had become clear to them. I don't doubt its origins as a spoof, though - dark as it may be, it's pretty arch as well.
     
  17. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Aunt May meets the Natasha Romanav the Black Widow...

    "Black Widow? That's adorable. I've buried 7 husbands, so take a plate of pie and a huge serving of shut the front door."
     
  18. The Old Mixer

    The Old Mixer Mih ssim, mih ssim, nam, daed si Xim. Moderator

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    As Lee tells it, he wanted to make Spidey a regular character but the publisher didn't care for the idea because it was too off-beat...thus Lee put him in what he knew was the last issue of AF. When the sales figures and fan mail came in, the publisher was singing a different tune.
     
  19. Guy Gardener

    Guy Gardener Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    What a Timely decision.
     
  20. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    At last, a new super hero