The Fantastic Four That Almost Was

The Fantastic Four are truly singular in the comic book hall of fame. Sure, they’re often duplicated — and in the case of something like The Incredibles, nearly outpaced — but no one can do what they do. Their status as “Marvel’s First Family” isn’t just a moniker: They were the company’s original superhero team, and they embodied the humanity, dysfunction, and charm of a real family like none of their predecessors could. (Plus, they had one of the greatest villains in comics history with Doctor Doom, pure evil personified.) Unfortunately, their sheer individualism has also given Hollywood a major run for its money. However popular and beloved Marvel’s First Family happens to be, most big-screen adaptations have kind of… well, sucked.

After 30 years, the rights to the Fantastic Four are now safely with their progenitors at Marvel Studios. Another film — the third attempt to bring the super-team to the big screen — is due to hit theaters soon, and though fans are daring to be optimistic, the big screen legacy of this property is hard to let go of. When 20th Century Fox held the rights to the Fantastic Four, the studio produced two different versions of the team, neither of which pleased the masses or fans of the original comics. Fantastic Four, released in 2005, opted for mid-2000s sensibilities over loyalty to the characters. Josh Trank’s 2015 reboot, archly dubbed Fant4stic, ran into much bigger issues by abandoning everything that made the team great — their sincerity and sense of whimsy — in favor of a dark and edgy remix. But whatever behind-the-scenes drama it encountered pales in comparison to the Fantastic Four movie that never even saw the light of day.

A false start

The Marvel of the ’80s and ’90s was not the untouchable titan we recognize today. The company’s perpetual struggles with bankruptcy saw chairman Stan Lee sell the rights to its most profitable characters on a first-come, first-serve basis. Cannon Films reportedly scored Spider-Man for a mere $225,000, and the Fantastic Four would be sold for a similar number.

The buyer: Bernd Eichinger, the CEO of Germany’s most successful film production company, Neue Constantin. He’d backed awards-nabbing dramas like Autumn Sonata, family films like The NeverEnding Story and popcorn flicks like Resident Evil — and he was a hardcore Marvel fan who had tried for years to acquire the rights to make a Fantastic Four movie. Eichinger’s 1986 deal with Marvel granted him film rights for the Fantastic Four, the Mole Man, the Silver Surfer, and a handful of other characters for six years. He spent those years searching for a backer who could produce a film — and though there was some interest from Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures, the issue of budget kept anyone from truly signing on. Eichinger’s option was set to expire, and Marvel was entirely disinterested in extending their deal.

“They didn’t want to prolong it, because they hated the deal,” Eichinger told Los Angeles Magazine in 2005. “They had realized they could sell the Marvel property for much more.”

With only a few months left to get a film up and running, Eichinger sought out the one producer he knew wouldn’t turn him down: Roger Corman. The self-proclaimed “King of the B-Movies” was already infamous by the time he met with Eichinger. His love for a low budget and his sneaky habit of ripping off other directors (like Carnosaur, which was like the B horror version of Jurassic Park) earned him a checkered reputation. But Corman’s productions had also become a proving ground for Hollywood greats like James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Jack Nicholson. A Fantastic Four film backed by his company wouldn’t be a major blockbuster, but maybe it could be an underdog on the indie market.

Eichinger pitched the idea to Corman in September 1992, and Corman confirmed that the film could indeed be made — on a budget of $1 million. It’d be a quick-and-dirty shoot with very little room for error, but if they poured enough into the film in post-production and secured a theatrical release, The Fantastic Four might actually stand a chance.

Full speed ahead

However Marvel felt about Eichinger’s move, 1993 was a good time to be a Marvel fan.

“It looks like Marvel finally can’t lose,” journalist Sean Howe revealed in Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four. Aside from The Fantastic Four, multiple high-profile Marvel projects were popping up left and right. “Jim Cameron is going to do The Amazing Spider-Man for Carolco, that’s exciting. Wesley Snipes is signed up to be the Black Panther. Wes Craven is all set to direct Doctor Strange. These are big names and these are going to become big properties. It’s sure.”

Ironically, none of these projects would see the light of day, but the cast and crew behind The Fantastic Four tried as hard as they could to avoid that fate. Early drafts of the script captured the dynamics of the team to the letter, and Oley Sassone — a music video director who saw this film as his big break — was determined to remain as faithful as possible to creator Jack Kirby’s original works. The cast came together quickly, and each was eager to embody their characters. Sure, they had very little money for costumes, effects, or set design, and filming mostly took place in a “studio” run out of a condemned, rat-infested warehouse, but the 21-day production felt like the beginning of something big for everyone involved.

Morale was high, all things considered. “There wasn’t any reason for any of us to think, at this point, that there was anything else going on,” Jay Underwood, the film’s Human Torch, insisted in Doomed.

The true red flags manifested at the end of production. Though there were still a handful of shots to secure, Corman’s Concorde Films refused to give Sassone and his team any more time to shoot. More than that, the company didn’t seem interested in dedicating any efforts to post-production, which included the edit, visual effects, sound, and music — basically, everything needed to make Fantastic Four a real movie.

“They just kinda let it languish in post for some reason,” Sassone recalled. “We were scratching our heads going, ‘Wait a minute, Roger’s cut a trailer… Why are we not finishing the movie?”

It didn’t help that Stan Lee had changed his tune about The Fantastic Four. Though he’d shown public support in the past, he later denounced the film outright. “I’m not expecting too much of it,” he told the crowd at San Diego Comic-Con in 1993. “It’s the last movie to be made that we in Marvel had no control over … There will be no other projects like that.”

“When we heard that, that really hurt,” Michael Bailey Smith, who portrayed Ben Grimm/The Thing, said in Doomed. “Then, we felt like, ‘Okay, now it’s us against the world.’”

Sassone and his crew would take it upon themselves to finish the film any way they could. The director was editing the film on the set of his next project. Concorde’s then-casting assistant was asked to put on the Thing’s suit and mask — an animatronic created with the same servile motors used in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — and shoot a sequence, guerrilla style, down Hollywood Boulevard. To record the score, composers David and Eric Wurst put down $6,000 of their own money to hire a 40-piece orchestra. Chris Gore, who’d been embedded on set throughout production, published a cover story in Film Threat. And the cast launched their own “grassroots publicity tour” to get the word out, appearing at any fan convention that would accommodate.

“I spent like 12 grand of my own money,” Smith admitted. “We hired a publicist … We started going around to the conventions and the comic book stores … children’s hospitals, radio interviews. We did everything possible to promote this thing.”

Their hard work seemed to be paying off: If nothing else, it earned them a premiere at the Mall of America. Corman was even planning to release The Fantastic Four on 500 screens.

Then, the other shoe dropped.

The “First” Fantastic Four Movie

The Fantastic Four was set to premiere at the Mall of America on Jan. 19, 1994. But shortly before the new year, Marvel issued a cease and desist order to the cast, while producer Avi Arad moved to purchase every print of The Fantastic Four and ensure the film never saw the light of day.

Arad is best known as the producer behind Marvel’s big comeback franchises: X-Men, Spider-Man, and, of course, the Fantastic Four. He, like MCU boss Kevin Feige, was adamant about a unified vision for the on-screen Marvel Universe, and The Fantastic Four was one of the last things standing in the way of that goal.

“He really didn’t like the idea that a small movie was coming out and maybe ruining the franchise,” Eichinger told Los Angeles Magazine. Arad bought the film from Concorde and Constantin, offering Eichinger and Corman $1 million to recoup their investment. As he later confirmed at a press junket for Spider-Man in 2002, he acquired every print of the film, even the negatives.

Though Arad claimed to have destroyed all traces of the film, at least one copy survived. One leak was taped on VHS, which led to another taping, then another, until hundreds of bootlegged copies were being sold at conventions and on eBay.

Those tapings disappeared in the 2010s — likely due to Marvel’s continued efforts to suppress any mention of the film — but The Fantastic Four has since resurfaced in countless iterations across the internet. Those who love the film really love it, though there are plenty of flaws keeping it from its blockbuster dreams. Even without Marvel’s sabotage, The Fantastic Four does have the look and feel of a B-movie. Its visual effects, paid for by its director and editor, run the gamut from credible (The Thing’s mask and costume, which actually look incredible) to cartoonish (the Human Torch in “Flame on!” form and Mr. Fantastic’s stretchy powers). Its plot is also muddled by the addition of another villain apart from the scenery-chewing Doctor Doom.

Still, it does wear its heart on its sleeve in a way that other Fantastic Four films are almost afraid to do. Each scene comes to life with the conviction of its cast; its sweeping score and devotion to the delightful weirdness of the original comics only add to The Fantastic Four’s merits. Had it gotten a theatrical release, it wouldn’t be that far off from something like 1993’s Super Mario Bros.: a troubled franchise film that eventually went on to become a cult classic — and was followed by a slick blockbuster with a $100 million budget some 30 years later. There are those who’ve launched a campaign to release the film once and for all, but Alex Hyde-White (who led The Fantastic Four as Mr. Fantastic) claims his project is more famous for its mystique, or the question of what could have been.

“It’s a nice sleeping dog. It’s still alive, and I’m happy to let it lay where it lays,” he told The A.V. Club in 2024. “I think the reason it keeps getting better and better is because it’s never been released. Do the math. Once it’s released, the story ends. Then it becomes the early version of Fantastic Four that now people have judgment about. Our Fantastic Four is a happy accident.”

It’s a bittersweet realization, but maybe The Fantastic Four has more legs as a legend, or the false start of a franchise, than the film it strived to be.