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Trivia / Fantastic Four (2015)

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Because there’s a lot to unpack here, we had to divide the Trivia into folders.

    open/close all folders 

    A-L 
  • Ability over Appearance:
    • Akin to the casting of Idris Elba as Heimdall in Thor, African American actor Michael B. Jordan's casting as the traditionally-Caucasian Human Torch was based solely on his acting ability — and for his prior work with the director on Chronicle. The original plan was to have Jordan stand out a little bit less by also having the Invisible Woman also be portrayed by an African American actress, but the studio vetoed the idea and put Kate Mara in the role instead.
    • In the comics, the Thing was a bulky guy even before he turned into a living golem. In this movie, he's played by the fairly lean Jamie Bell, who bulks up through motion-capture. Bell was most likely chosen for his ability to act over physical attributes.
  • Adored by the Network:
    • Even after the movie flopped at the box office, Fox apparently insisted that theaters keep playing the movie in spite of the low attendance. This got to the point they were very vocal about still going through with a sequel, until they quietly shelved it before the home video release.
    • FX put the movie in frequent rotation.
  • Approval of God: If Josh Trank's own word is anything to go by, he pitched his dark take on Fantastic Four to Stan Lee, who approved.
  • Ashcan Copy: The movie was made primarily so 20th Century Fox could keep the rights to the characters. The rights were retained, but the movie itself was a nuclear flop, killing the possibility of a sequel or another Fox-helmed reboot. Ironically, it's entirely likely that Fox would have actually made a lot more money if they had simply sold the rights back wholesale before entering production than they would in making a deal after the movie's release. In any case, this became entirely pointless when Disney bought 21st Century Fox's TV and film divisions and the franchises associated with them, including the remaining Marvel movie rights.
  • Awesome, Dear Boy: Kate Mara joined the cast because she liked superhero movies and wanted to play a superheroine herself. It should be noted that Mara had been turned down for a number of roles in other comic book movies beforehand. This is rather ironic considering that the director was very mean to her on set and that she has a rather strong distaste towards the finished product.
  • Box Office Bomb: While the film was produced on a $155 million budget ($200 million including prints and advertising), it only made $167.4 million worldwide at the box office. It was expected to lose Twentieth Century Fox $80 million to $100 million — and in terms of domestic gross, the movie could not match the first Tim Story movie's opening weekend gross until its tenth week.
  • California Doubling: Baton Rouge, Louisiana stands in for New York City. New York-style buses were even brought in to make the sets look more realistic.
  • Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Josh Trank himself never once referred to this film as "gritty." That was actually Simon Kinberg.
  • Creator Backlash: Everyone who worked on this movie went on to express regret for making it later on.
  • Creator-Chosen Casting:
  • Creator's Apathy: According to Jeremy Slater, Trank was not interested in making a comic-accurate version of the Fantastic Four, and during the scripting stage, his enthusiasm ran out at the point when the team got their powers, and wasn't interested in the various action set-pieces that Slater tried to pitch to him. As a result, the shooting script didn't have an ending, and Fox had to hastily cobble one together during reshoots.
  • Creator's Favorite: The marketing campaign made no attempt to hide the fact that Josh Trank likes the Human Torch (as played by Michael B. Jordan, an actor he was friends with), who was advertised much more than the other characters.
  • Darkhorse Casting: Josh Trank wanted to go for rising stars as opposed to safe bets in order to make the Younger and Hipper aspect of the film more believable.
  • Dawson Casting: While never explicitly stated, the timeline given in the film would put Reed and Ben at around seventeen or eighteen when Reed is recruited to the Baxter program; Miles Teller and Jamie Bell being about ten years older than that at the time of filming.
  • Disowned Adaptation:
    • The official Marvel Comics website does not mention this movie at all. Keep in mind that every other 20th Century Fox Marvel movie is listed on the website, and even Howard the Duck, Old Shame that it is, is mentioned. The movie apparently left such a bad taste in Marvel's mouth that they similarly didn't promote Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse on their website in spite of promoting Fox's previous X-Men movies (they remained mum on X-Men: Apocalypse, which had a mediocre reception, but admitted they liked Deadpool).
    • The Punisher #12 has stand-ins of the film's cast be violently killed in an explosion. Marvel clearly isn't fond of the movie (although the writer of the comic issued a Suspiciously Specific Denial by saying that the cast weren't actually killed in the explosion).
    • Even Stan Lee declined to make his traditional Creator Cameo, making this the only instance prior to his passing in which his absence was not caused by health or scheduling issues.
      • He also did not list the film among the gallery of Marvel film adaptations on his old website. (To speak to how bad that is, even Howard the Duck was listed on it. Ouch.)
    • In an interview with Mark Millar, co-writer of the first story-arc of Ultimate Fantastic Four, the interviewer mentioned the movie was based on his work, to which Millar responded, "Loosely." Keep in mind that at the time Millar was a creative consultant for 20th Century Fox.
  • Dueling Movies: The movie originally had the odds stacked against it by being wedged between three major blockbusters - it would have competed with Jurassic World, which was slated to be released in the previous weekend, Inside Out, which would be released the same weekend as Fantastic Four, and Ted 2, which was going to come out in the following weekend. Fox noticed this problem and pushed the release date back by two months, making it compete with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), and Straight Outta Compton. Unfortunately, the move didn't help the movie at all once the bad word-of-mouth came around, and it ended up lagging behind Rogue Nation on its opening weekend.
  • Dueling Works: With Ant-Man for the position of the more successful late-Summer superhero movie. It lost, leaving Ant-Man as the dark horse victor in the situation (as many presumed it would be a major flop due to the titular hero being something of a punchline among non-comic book fans).
  • Dyeing for Your Art: Kate Mara dyed her hair blonde. She put on a wig for the reshoots.
  • Executive Meddling:
    • Josh Trank envisioned his film as being between 2 hours and 20 minutes long; Fox cut that down significantly to a little over 1 hour and 30 minutes, plus about 10 minutes for credits. Judging by Trank's now-infamous comment about the film, it also appears that the rumors that he wasn't very involved in editing and reshoots are true, meaning that the studio took over. Numerous reviews noted that the reshot scenes (in which Kate Mara wears a noticeable wig) are primarily in the second half, which feels like it belongs to a different movie than the first half.
    • Entertainment Weekly later revealed that Trank lost the dressing room because he was combative and abusive toward the cast, producers, and crew, at one point almost getting into a fistfight with Miles Teller. This, combined with personal issues (such as Trank trashing his rental house in response to a landlord's complaint), led Fox to pull Trank from the film's production prior to the reshoots. The same article also mentions that Fox insisted that Trank include Kate Mara as Sue Storm and as a result, the two didn't get along during principal photography.
    • Ironically, according to sources who have spoke out in articles about the production, Fox tried to keep their distance from the project as a response to the perception of Fox as micromanaging taskmasters due to X-Men Origins: Wolverine's own Troubled Production and just let their new auteur work. However, by the time the production was going off the rails and they started to interfere, it was too late to save the project, which now had a disorganized vision and executive meddling.
    • Trank has claimed the studio blocked him from hiring a black actress to play Susan Storm.
  • Executive Veto: Supposedly, Marvel's corporate heads (or possibly their lawyers) vetoed the possibility of an X-Men/Fantastic Four crossover, which is why the initial plan to create a Shared Universe was shot dead so suddenly at the beginning of production. Regardless of whether or not they could make it work, the film's critical thrashing and subsequent nuclear box office meltdown torpedoed any future chances of crossover for this particular iteration of the Fantastic Four. It's been suggested that a crossover was only suggested in the first place in order to blunt the movie's bad word of mouth and to get X-Men movie fans to buy tickets.
  • Fake Nationality:
    • Victor Von Doom is being played by the British Toby Kebbell, though the character is from eastern Europe (Latveria borders Hungary, Serbia, and Romania). On top of all that, Kebbell has said his version is an Americanized European who still has a hint of an accent.
    • Also English-born Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm.
    • American-born Kate Mara is playing Sue Storm, who is Kosovo-born in this adaptation. She briefly uses an accent.
  • Follow the Leader: It was one of the most recent entries into the genre that sought to do to its property that Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy starting with Batman Begins did for it's in trying to create a more serious and grounded version of the mythos. It (together with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice the following year) ultimately didn't help in seeing that movement continue.
  • Follow-Up Failure:
    • Chronicle made Josh Trank seem like an obvious choice to direct comic-book movies. This film's failure torpedoed any chances of that ever happening again.
    • The movie was meant to be better than the other attempts at making Fantastic Four movies. It was the worst-reviewed out of all of them and bombed heavily unlike them. In fact, the first two films were compared favorably to this one with reviews stating that while those movies didn't utilize all the potential they had, they at least had coherent stories and felt like comic book movies.
  • Franchise Killer: After the movie flopped, a planned sequel was taken off of Fox's release schedule, and two years later, Disney announced that they intend to integrate the Fantastic Four and X-Men properties into the Marvel Cinematic Universe following their purchase of assets from 20th Century Fox, making this the very last Fox-produced Fantastic Four movie. Sure enough, characters from both mentioned franchises made their MCU debut in 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madnessnote , and a new film with absolutely no relation to Fant4stic is set to arrive in 2025, a full decade after that film's release.
  • God Does Not Own This World: Marvel had absolutely no creative control over the content of the film - it was entirely a Fox production. Stan Lee later mentioned that Fox did not consult with him at all about the project, and he also joked that the movie didn't do well because they didn't call him over to make a cameo. Fox tried to insinuate that this wasn't the case to people who weren't paying attention by prominently including the Marvel logo in the trailers, most likely to try to fool people into thinking it was a movie set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Fox had to chase Marvel, who did not want anything to do with the film and subsequently escaped Fox and the film's failure).
  • God Never Said That: No one ever told the cast not to watch the previous movies.
  • Hostility on the Set: During production, Josh Trank was abusive with the cast, crew and the producers, and this was one of the major contributing factors to its Troubled Production. There is at least one report of Trank and Miles Teller nearly getting into a fist fight on set.
  • Invisible Advertising: Disney+ gave no advance notice of this movie's addition to their US branch; not even any "What's Coming to Disney+ in June?" articles listed it.
    M-Z 
  • Mid-Development Genre Shift: After the studio was left displeased with a rough cut of Josh Trank's work — which was intended to be a Body Horror Genre Deconstruction — the movie was revised into a standard superhero movie narrative, featuring additional setpieces and jokes added to the script.
  • Missing Trailer Scene: A number of sequences were cut from the movie, but were still visibly advertised.
    • The sequence where Thing jumps out of a plane and leads a one-man assault against a military compound was removed from the film entirely.
    • The shot of Johnny looking down a hall before "flaming on" was also cut.
    • The Vagueness Is Coming line was completely removed, as is Doom's conversation with Reed. Dr. Allen is the one standing over Doom and questioning him in the final cut of the film.
    • In one of the trailers, Doom says "You opened a door you don't know how to close." This was not in the film.
    • In the second trailer, the Thing is standing over Doom and about to punch him; this never happened in the film.
    • In more than one of the trailers, a crying Susan is looking over her brother Johnny in the negative zone, as if he's injured and she's worried about it. This was not in the film.
    • Some shots from the final battle (Reed's controlling his punch and Ben's big punch) are there, but completely different from how they were in the trailer.
    • A few more mentioned here.
  • Not Screened for Critics: The movie was screened for critics a mere two days before it was released in the United States. However, the movie was intended to be premiered in several regions before then - which did not have screenings for critics either. And then the international premieres were delayed until after the United States premiere, which essentially means that the movie was only screened for critics at the eleventh hour, at which point it might as well not have been screened for them at all. The online embargo lasted until two days before the release date and the print embargo lasted until the release date. Needless to say, when the critics did eventually see the film, they nearly completely hated and eviscerated it, earning an abysmal 9% on Rotten Tomatoes.
  • Preview Piggybacking: The movie tried to do this with the trailer for Deadpool, although it didn't help the movie's box office numbers in the end.
  • Production Posse: Josh Trank and Michael B. Jordan worked together on Chronicle, and Jordan plays the role of Johnny Storm.
  • Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: When the film had to undergo lots of extensive re-shoots, Kate Mara had cut her hair short for The Martian. She wore a wig in an attempt to match her original hairstyle, but it's easy to spot the re-shot scenes because of the differences.
  • Release Date Change: The movie was originally scheduled to come out on March 6, 2015, but was later moved to June 19, and August 7 after that.
  • Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Josh Trank's on-set behavior cost him the dressing room for reshoots and potentially all possibility of him directing another big-budget film, and was likely a factor in him stepping out of a Star Wars movie. The highly-publicized tweet he sent out slamming the movie certainly didn't help. He has since, however, continued his directing with the more modestly-budgeted Capone.
  • Romance on the Set: Jamie Bell and Kate Mara got something out of the movie, as started dating during the production. Eventually, they got married in 2017.
  • Saved from Development Hell: The movie was first announced in August 2009 (around the time the Marvel Cinematic Universe was starting up, and Disney's purchase of Marvel), but did not go anywhere until Josh Trank was completely committed to the project by 2014.
  • Star-Derailing Role: The colossal disaster of this film wrecked the careers of most of its young up-and-coming stars, with only Michael B. Jordan avoiding lasting damage after he rebounded spectacularly with Creed also being released later in 2015 (and then three years later with his role in Black Panther).
  • Streisand Effect: Fox's attempt to cover up information leaks about the Troubled Production — particularly, one rant allegedly posted by Josh Trank on an imageboard — invariably ended up increasing awareness of it in certain circles. The imageboard instance in particular is notable, as it seemingly confirmed that the poster was in fact Josh Trank and not just a troll, given the actions Fox took.
  • Trend Killer: This film, alongside Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, was a temporary death knell for superhero movies that served as a Darker and Edgier continuity reboot, a trend starting with Batman Begins. It wasn't until The Batman (2022) when such a reboot became another success.
  • Troubled Production: As described in a thirteen video series produced by YouTube channel Midnight's Edge and on the dedicated page, the film's production was quite chaotic. The script was extensively rewritten throughout production, director Josh Trank left production because of his on-set behavior and conflicts with the studio, and Fox conducted re-shoots in Los Angeles, ballooning the budget as a result.
  • What Could Have Been: Has its own page.
  • Writer Revolt: After being told that he needed to make further changes to the movie in post-production after the previous bout of Executive Meddling, Josh Trank stopped cooperating with Twentieth Century Fox. They proceeded without him.
  • Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: In the midst of filming, numerous changes to the script were made. Rewrites got so bad that by the time they finished production, they didn't even film an ending to the movie, and the ending was filmed during reshoots.
  • Written-In Infirmity: Miles Teller's scars were added to the child actor playing the younger version of Reed Richards, even though they could have been relegated to a Noodle Incident between the prologue and the present day of the story.

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