If there's one superhero franchise that's had a tough time at the box office, it's the "Fantastic Four." The superhero team has been repeatedly put on celluloid merely to prevent the rights from lapsing, resulting in several lackluster adaptations. The first, shot in 1994 and never released, is notoriously awful, and was only made so that producer Bernd Eichinger could hold onto the film rights.
Those rights eventually landed at 20th Century Fox, which produced "Fantastic Four" in 2005 and "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" in 2007. Both were box office successes, but never garnered much of a following. Then, in 2015, Fox released a new Fantastic Four film, but it wasn't easy to make. Plans to reboot the franchise began in 2009, but the movie got stuck in development hell for six years. By 2012, director Josh Trank had signed on, leading to script rewrites, and shooting wouldn't begin until 2014.
The film, featuring a ridiculous stylized logo of "FANT4STIC," was finally released to overwhelmingly negative reviews. "Fantastic Four" was devoid of any humor and featured utterly unlikeable characters. The actors did their best with the lackluster script they were given, but very little of it related to the source material, and it almost seemed as if the film was made to spite comic book fans. Fortunately, this was the last retain-the-rights Fantastic Four film from a non-Marvel studio, thanks to Disney's acquisition of Fox in 2019.
