Teaser Trailer For Josh Trank’s ‘Fantastic Four’ Offers First Glimpse Of The Team
20th Century Fox's movie reboot of the Fantastic Four doesn't seem to have generated much buzz among comic fans, perhaps because all we hear about the movie is the ways in which it diverges from the comics created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The cast is young; the space mission origin story has apparently changed; and Doctor Doom is rumored to be an angry blogger named Domashev rather than a foreign despot. We seem to know a lot about what the movie won't be; now it's time for Fox to tell us what the movie will be.
With this first trailer, audiences finally get a sense of the style and tone of director Josh Trank's take on the Fantastic Four, with a look of the characters in their preferred environments, plus a shot of the whole team standing shoulder-to-shoulder -- from behind. And honestly, it looks more promising than the drip-drip-drip of rumors and casting announcements had led us to expect!
The trailer features voice-over from Reg E. Cathey as Dr Franklin Storm, father of Michael B. Jordan's Johnny and Kate Mara's Sue. Sure, the trailer initially feels a little like one of those Veridian Dynamics commercials from the sitcom Better Off Ted, but we soon meet our cast, including Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm and Miles Teller as Reed Richards, and get the teensiest glimpse of their powers, and all of that stuff looks pretty cool. We're not sold yet, but we're more optimistic than we were before!
Notably missing in all this is any sign of the villain, Doom. But our friends at ScreenCrush noted that the trailer does offer an Easter egg of sorts at the 00:46 second mark (above); the numbers 23.21.190.125 appear on the screens that Sue is looking at, and when you paste those numbers into your browser bar you're taken to either the Wikipedia page for Latveria or another Latveria-related website, such as a Google search or the Marvel Wikia page. Dare we dream that Doom will be a foreign despot after all?
If the trailer alone wasn't enough for you, Yahoo has released a commentary on the trailer by director Trank and writer Simon Kinberg, which you can see below.
Fantastic Four arrives in North American theaters on August 7th.