Well, mostly new.
According to Schmoes Know, Josh Trank’s The Fantastic Four will have an origin story inspired by the Ultimate Fantastic Four comics.
The site writes “that instead of the group gaining their powers from a failed scientific mission in outer space like in the original comics and (awful) existing films, this time the group’s origin story will be much more like their Ultimate versions.
“In the film, the team will gain their powers through a lab experiment gone wrong in a way, where they create a portal to another world or dimension (its not clear) and they get their powers after the exposure to this other dimension/planet.
The other small titbit of news that we have is that the film is going to be VERY character-driven. I don’t want to say that the action in the film takes a backseat or is secondary, but this first instalment is much more focused on setting up the characters and their relationships with each other and their nemesis Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) than it is about making things blow up in big action set pieces.”
The Ultimate comics have always had a symbiotic relationship with the movies – when the line launched, Mark Millar and Andy/Adam Kubert took the look and tone of Ultimate X-Men from Bryan Singer’s first movie, while Millar and artist Bryan Hitch’s The Ultimates contributed scenes wholesale to Captain America: The First Avenger and Avengers Assemble.
They also clear up the relationship between Michael B Jordan’s Johnny Storm and Kate Mara’s Sue Storm, which only really needed cleaning up if you’re either lacking in imagination or a racist or both.
“We have heard from our source that it is actually Mara’s Sue Storm who is adopted in the film, with her and Michael B Jordan’s parents being African American! (So it’s still basically what we have all assumed about their relationship, only the film has flipped it around.) ”
I’m just going to repeat a line of this with selected emphasis:
“It’s still basically what we have all assumed about their relationship, only the film has flipped it around.”
Which looks suspiciously like they’re saying: “What a plot twist! We knew they had to be adopted because one of the was black and one was white, and let’s face it guys – the black dude was probably adopted because… you know… um, ghetto life and stuff?”
Fantastic Four is set to be released on 7 August 2015. You can buy Josh Trank’s Chronicle on Blu-ray for £9.75 at Amazon.co.uk and find out more on the comics that have inspired the film by picking up our 100 All-Time Greatest Comics bookazine now!
