(L-R): Jamie Bell, Miles Teller, Kate Mara and Michael B Jordan pose at the premiere of Fantastic Four. PHOTO: FILE
Fox’s hopes of rejuvenating the comic book characters and turning the super-team into a cinematic juggernaut to rival X-Men have flamed out given that the film debuted to a dreadful $26.2 million across 3,995 theatres. With a production budget of $120 million, plus millions more in marketing costs, the film will need to get a boost from foreign crowds if it wants to avoid being a write-off.
The studio was banking on a cast of up-and-coming actors like Michael B Jordan and Miles Teller and a wunderkind director in the form of Chronicle’s Josh Trank to push the Human Torch, the Thing, Invisible Woman and Mr Fantastic into the modern era, but production difficulties may have doomed the project. Trank reportedly exhibited bizarre behaviour on set that was so extreme it cost him his gig directing a Star Wars spinoff. He seemed to acknowledge those tensions, blaming studio-mandated reshoots for the poor critical notices in a tweet Thursday that he subsequently deleted.
“This turned into a nightmare for Fox,” said Jeff Bock, an analyst with Exhibitor Relations. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong and the whole thing fell apart.”
Fantastic Four’s opening is well below the $40 million-plus debut that most analysts had projected and trails the $56 million launch of 2005’s Fantastic Four and the $58 million bow of 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. It’s the worst opening for a movie featuring Marvel Comics’ characters since Ghost Rider The Spirit of Vengeance” debuted to $22.1 million in 2012. A C- CinemaScore, along with 8% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 4.0 rating on IMBD means that word-of-mouth is going to be toxic.
“The confluence of clearly the decidedly negative reviews with the combination of social media did not help the cause,” said Fox distribution Chief Chris Aronson.
He was not willing to write off the Fantastic Four series yet, but stressed that the studio would be engaged in a rigorous post-mortem about the film’s failure. The foursome’s future might be as supporting players in other comic book characters’ movies.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 11th, 2015.
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