With the Fantastic Four now firmly ensconced in the MCU, the 2015 misfire Fantastic Four mostly lives on as a meme. All over the internet, one can find images of Miles Teller‘s Reed Richards asking his friend(?) Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) to “say that again,” after the Thing says the word “fantastic” in the movie’s final scene.
While it’s often used to belittle the movie, the scene is actually one of the few times in which the team actually feels close to the brightly-colored family of adventurers depicted in the pages of Marvel Comics. But to hear Teller tell it, Fantastic Four 2015 should have been so much better. “I think it’s unfortunate because so many people worked so hard on that movie,” Teller said on Radio Andy (via Entertainment Weekly). “And, honestly, maybe there was one really important person who kind of f—ked it all up.”
Teller doesn’t name any names, but it’s not hard to figure out who he’s referring to. Director Josh Trank famously refused to support the movie back when it released in the summer of 2015, and even took to Twitter to bash the finished product. In a now-deleted tweet, Trank claims that he “had a fantastic version of [the movie]” that “would’ve received great reviews,” hinting that the studio took the project away from him. “You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”
Trank’s problems with the movie don’t just extend to its release. Hired by Fox off his successful found footage superhero film Chronicle, Trank had a darker take on the material than one usually associates with the Fantastic Four. Trank described his version as a David Cronenberg-inspired body horror movie, specifically citing Scanners and The Fly as influences. For his part, screenwriter Jeremy Slater imagined something more faithful to the comics, with the Fantasticar, Galactus, and Dr. Doom becoming the Herald of Galactus.
