The history of the Fantastic Four film franchise is like a malfunctioning portal to the Marvel multiverse: each time you step through you land in a slightly more rubbish timeline. The 2005 and 2007 films were riddled with 00s cheese, as if comic book movies were being reimagined with a hokey daytime TV sheen. The Bold and the Beautiful with Ioan Gruffudd as a sentient bottle of Brylcreem; Jessica Alba as a glowing-eyed mannequin struggling to emote through industrial-strength contacts; Michael Chiklis trapped in what looked like a spray-painted novelty boulder from a 1990s Disneyland stunt show.
Then came Fantastic Four in 2015, a reboot so mind-numbingly appalling that if it had existed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Time Variance Authority would have wanted to prune it from existence before it ever hit cinemas. Directed by Josh Trank, who later all but disowned it, the film promised a dark and doomy reimagining but was instead the superhero equivalent of a half-finished Ikea shelf: structurally unstable, missing key components, and abandoned by its creators before anyone could make sense of the instructions.
