In the post Batman1989 climate, superhero movies were looking more attractive to big studios. They don’t appear anywhere in the materials for Josh Trank’s film, but anyway, I digress. It’s worth noting that Neue Constantin eventually became Constantin Film, and they still received credit on 20th Century Fox’s two Fantastic Four movies, so clearly there were still some legal matters that had to be sorted through. Things were so weird back before our current golden age of superhero movies that a relatively small studio like Germany’s Neue Constantin (best known at the time for The NeverEnding Story and who later produced Downfall, the film that sparked countless Hitler memes) was able to secure the rights to the FF for approximately $250,000 in 1986. You think it’s bad sorting out Marvel Studios, 20th Century Fox, Sony, and maybe Universal? Yeah, forget it.

Once upon a time, the film rights to Marvel Comics characters were in an even more fractured state than they are today. Those two movies, which were reasonably faithful to the comics, met with tepid critical and commercial success and stopped 20th Century Fox’s grand franchise plans for the FF dead in their tracks for nearly a decade. The source material that spawned two uninspired blockbuster-by-numbers entries with 2005’s Fantastic Fourand 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. You know, that same source material that has been selling at close to cancellation numbers for a decade or more. The basis of that resistance was (allegedly) the perception that the movie wasn’t faithful enough to the source material. Take the Josh Trank directed Fantastic Four reboot, which was met with such tremendous resistance by the intenet before a single photo was even revealed.

It’s remarkable how The Fantastic Four, a comic book property that has generated so little interest in the general public that the comic book bearing its name would have been canceled years ago were it not for its venerable history, inspires such a protective instinct among fans.

Download Fantastic Four