Max Landis On What Could Have Been His FANTASTIC FOUR Trilogy

With Fantastic Four Languishing in the Box Office (Current numbers are Total Domestic Gross: $49,708,994 and a surprising Worldwide Gross: $130,508,994), and the fact that most of the cast apparently hated the experience of working on the film, we probably won’t be seeing a sequel to the film any time soon, but it could have been a much different story. Max Landis is now opening up about his pitch for a trilogy of FF films as well as his relationship with Josh Trank.

His take is definitely a different, especially when it comes to what he planned in his plans for Doctor Doom:

“I had Doctor Doom as a good guy, one of Reed’s college friends, and my whole movie he’s trying to find and help them but it wasn’t clear if he was good or bad—until the finale of the movie when you realize his connection to Reed, and that they’re best friends. The audience who knows Doctor Doom thinks he’s going to turn bad, but the movie ends with him saving them. And in the sequel he’s probably good, too. You know, you Sam Raimi-Spider-Man it—at the end of the sequel he gets all [frick]ed up and shows up in the Doctor Doom armor. But then in the third movie he’s like, ‘What have you done to me?’”

As you may know, Landis and Josh Trank had initially worked together on Chronicle. When Josh had his Twitter blow out a couple weeks ago, Landis had also posted some pages from his version of the script.

“I actually feel bad about [the timing of posting those script pages on Twitter] because I’d always intended to post them that day, but I was not aware of what was going to be happening with that movie at that time. It was kind of thoughtless of me in hindsight. We weren’t close before. We were sort of frenemies in high school. He’s a very intense personality, and I think he’s a very good director. But in this business—and I know this better than anyone—having an intense personality is a double-edged sword. It wasn’t fun to see all of that happen to him, because who knows what happened there?”

In regards to the Chronicle sequel which he would have done without Trank, and which would have introduced a villain(ess) who faces off against Matt (Alex Russell), the lone survivor of the first film:

“I don’t want to sh*t-talk Fox but it really became clear that Chronicle is not a movie they would have made if they knew what they were making. So when I wrote the sequel to that movie, they said, ‘This is dark. Where is the aspirational fun stuff? This is a dark dramatic thriller about superheroes that’s found footage. No one’s going to want to see this.’”

Source: CBM via the Daily Beast