Home Alone and Harry Potter director Chris Columbus could have added the original Fantastic Four to his filmography in 2005, if he hadn’t been suddenly fired from the project. As he has explained now, it was for a rather strange reason — because he had “too many thoughts.”
“We found ourselves in a strange situation. I was working on the script for the first Fantastic Four. Many screenwriters were involved. I was producing the movie, I went and met with the director and the other producer, and I had some ideas,” Columbus recalls in the Fade to Black podcast. “Basically, I said: “Some of these concepts should be more like Jack Kirby, the creator of the Fantastic Four, and the Silver Age of Marvel.” I left that meeting, and on the way out, I got a call from the head of 20th Century Fox saying that I was fired because I had too many opinions.”
Columbus was later named executive producer of Fox’s Fantastic Four films, but insisted that he had “nothing to do with them.”
The director also noted that this experience “made him a little bit angry about superheroics.”
“It partly started with Spider-Man 2. When I saw what Sam Raimi had done, I thought it was the perfect superhero movie. Then individual fragments came one by one. The first Batman movies and the last one by Matt Reeves with Robert Pattinson, I thought they were brilliant. But I realized that I no longer had the desire to make them. People are doing it better than I could have imagined at this stage of my career.”
“The Fantastic Four, starring Ioan Griffith, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis, revealed the origin story of the first Marvel family on the big screen, focusing on the “unforgettable style of early 2000s superheroes”: with dark, stylish sets and elegant super costumes, but far from the royal blue of Kirby’s colorful comics.
Currently, the 2005 film has a total of 28% from critics and 45% from the audience at Rotten Tomatoes.
Interestingly, Columbus seems to have been ahead of his time in that old conversation, as many superhero films nowadays imitate the classic comic book style. For example, the new “Fantastic Four: The First Steps” set in the retro-futuristic style of the ’60s, contains many details from the original material, including lighter and brighter costumes. Although neither this nor the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal did not help the movie achieve great success at the box office
In another interview, Columbus reacted to HBO’s new Harry Potter adaptation — not without a share of criticism and the question “does it make sense?”.
Source: Games Radar, IGN
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: