Simon Kinberg Talks About The Failure of FANTASTIC FOUR, Still Wants a Sequel

Last year's Fantastic Four was a colossal creative failure for 20th Century Fox. It put Josh Trank in director's jail (maybe forever?) and received such hatred from fans that a sequel seemed completely out of the question. But months later, writer/producer Simon Kinberg is still holding out hope that we'll see the same cast members suit up for another adventure. He told Den of Geek:

“We want to make another Fantastic Four movie. We love that cast - I mean if I were to say to you now Michael B. Jordan and Miles Teller, and Kate [Mara] and Jamie [Bell] are great actors - we love that cast. I love the comic, I mean I love it almost as much as X-Men.”

“We'll try to be truer to the essence of the tone of Fantastic Four, which is completely - well, not completely, but largely - distinct from the X-Men, which is brighter, funner, more optimistic tone. I think we tried to make a darker Fantastic Four movie, which seemed like a radical idea but we were kind of messing with the DNA of the actual comic instead of trusting the DNA of the comic.”

You'd think that Hollywood would have learned by now that darker doesn't always automatically equal better. Kingberg knows the first film didn't live up to its potential:

“We didn't make a good movie, and the world voted, and I think they probably voted correctly. And you can't make a good movie every time out - not everybody does. We actually have a pretty good batting average, all things considered. But I think we made many mistakes when we made that movie - mistakes that we learned from and we wouldn't repeat.”

The obvious ideal scenario here is for the rights of the characters to return to Marvel Studios. But let's assume that isn't going to happen (at least for a few more years): do diehard fans of the Fantastic Four comic even want to see a sequel with the same cast, or did the reboot leave such a bad taste in everyone's mouths that it'd be better to recast it completely and try again?