While Chris Columbus is arguably best known for directing the first two Home Alone movies, he’s also someone who knows his way around fantastical material, as evidenced by his work on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Percy Jackson and Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, among other projects. However, he has yet to delve into the superhero genre, though it’s not for lack of trying. There was a time when Columbus was going to direct a Fantastic Four movie, and I’m frankly shocked by the reason it didn’t pan out for him.
Columbus recalled his time with Marvel’s First Family while appearing on the Fade to Black Podcast to talk about his new movie The Thursday Murder Club, which is streamable with a Netflix subscription. This was a decade before the Fantastic Four movie starred Ioan Gruffud, Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans came out, and apparently the director’s interest in adhering to the team’s early source material turned off executives at 20th Century Fox. He recalled:
