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.
