fantastic four

Welcome to Cast Party, the feature that imagines a world with even more live action comic book adaptations than we currently have, and comes up with arguably the best casting suggestions you’re ever going to find for the movies and shows we wish could exist. This week we’re visiting a concept that has yet to be done justice in a movie, but one that clearly has potential. The Fantastic Four, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's most impressive co-creation, will certainly get another movie sooner or later, because Fox doesn't want to give up the rights. And obviously I have opinions on how to finally do it justice.

Valentine's Day weekend is upon us, and love, bad chocolate, and expensive restaurant reservations are everywhere you look. To mark the occasion, we've compiled a list of the 30 greatest couples in comics. These are the romantic pairings whose stories inspire us to believe in the power of love, and whose devotion to each other may provide a model for how to woo your own beloved when they're cloned, or possessed by evil forces, or you forget their birthday or whatever.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. Everyone loves Spider-Man, and since almost everything that happens in the Marvel Universe happens in New York City, it’s no surprise that Marvel’s most popular web-slinging New Yorker has run into basically every Marvel character at one point or another. But this week, we’re not just looking for some random time Spidey and Daredevil stopped a bank robbery and got hot dogs. We’re talking about the kind of crossovers that are so colossal or crazy that they only come around once in a great while.

We can all agree that Fantastic Four was far from great, a CG-saturated mess with a few good character moments eclipsed by all those rumors about Josh Trank. And while Fox has taken the sequel off the table (for now), there’s at least one person who’d be down to return for Fantastic Four 2: Michael B. Jordan.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. Nobody’s perfect, and just because the House of Ideas has been responsible for some of the greatest spectacles in comic history doesn’t mean they haven’t had their fair share of awful moments as well. This week, we point our all seeing eye of judgment at five of the worst offenders.

Flame off? After Fantastic Four’s hugely disappointing opening earlier this year, Fox initially claimed they were still moving ahead with a sequel, keeping the planned June 9, 2017 release date. But, after a closer look at the situation and perhaps a good dose of common sense, Fox has removed Fantastic Four 2 from their release schedule.

It’s been said that Doctor Doom is not just one of the greatest supervillains of all time but rather that he’s the supervillain, the one that defines them all. Whenever Doom appears, he's always a huge threat. That’s evident from his very first appearance in Fantastic Four #5 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, when he kidnaps Sue Storm and forces the rest of the FF to travel back in time to steal Blackbeard’s treasure to help him conquer the world. He later teamed up with Namor the Sub-Mariner to send the team into space --- by literally magnetizing the Baxter Building and attaching it to a rocket ship. Of course, he double crosses Namor and the FF. But Namor gets the upper hand and gets the FF back to Earth, leaving Doom on an asteroid careening out into space. But do you think that stopped him?

Before Fantastic Four opened to dismal box office and even more dismal reviews, 20th Century Fox attempted to combat the bad buzz surrounding the film by greenlighting a sequel. It was a vote of confidence – they were prepared to stick with this cast moving forward. Then everyone saw the final trainwreck and the internet proceeded to pick over the film’s fascinating corpse in a desperate attempt to figure out what happened with this production. We all assumed that announced sequel was dead and buried. We were wrong.

We have spent our fair share of time sifting through the ashes of the new Fantastic Four movie, desperately trying to figure out exactly what happened here. Call it a morbid fascination. Call it professional curiosity. All we know is that the finished movie is not what anyone involved set out to make. Now we have another item of interest – a glimpse at an early screenplay for the film and it couldn’t be more different than the final film.

When Fantastic Four stumbled into theaters two weekends ago, the audiences that did show up noticed that the movie in theaters was not the movie being sold in the trailers. There were a ton of scenes and elements present in the marketing that were absent from the finished film. We even catalogued them right here. The full details of what went down (and what went wrong) on this set will probably remain covered up for a while yet, but details have begun to slowly trickle out. Now we know exactly what happened to the biggest missing scene of them all. Sort of.