warning: contains comics

So, unsurprisingly, Fantastic Four (2015) tanked this weekend. I’m not surprised, really; it sounds like it simply didn’t get the characters or the concept, plus, there’s the whole talk of the studio losing confidence in the director and doing reshoots which led to a film described as having no second act and a largely incomprehensible ending. Plus, the Thing needs pants.

So we now have four FF film adaptations, two of which seem to be calculated to simply hold onto the film rights, and two flawed but marginally successful films that seem dated (but having re-watched them both recently, they’re not all bad). And, in a lot of ways, the 1994 never-intended-to-be-released cheapie can be considered the best of the bunch. Weird.

Oh well, maybe this’ll end up hatching a deal between Fox and Marvel to get comics’ first family back home (though not too soon, because I don’t want a new FF film to push out compelling projects like Captain Marvel on the schedule). More to come.

The other interesting piece out this week has to do with the other rights-issue character, Spider-Man. Latino Review second-hand linked (and eventually debunked) an interesting image of the MCU’s Spider-Man (as he’ll first appear in Captain America: Civil War next year) in his “homemade” costume before coming into the larger world of established supers. There’s been a lot of talk about how they’ll do Spidey, alluding to John Hughes high school movies from the 80s (which makes total sense, given the early teenage drama in the early years, especially when John Romita was drawing things in the early 70s – Spider-Man was half romance comic), and starting in media res without an origin story (Spider-Man’s existence already being alluded to at the end of Ant-Man), including some interesting alleged descriptions of concept art of the kind of gear Peter is wall-crawling around in.

Then yesterday, this image popped up:

The image is supposed to be a screencap of Civil War footage (which kind of makes sense, as D23, the Disney Expo is this weekend, and new Marvel footage is expected); though it’s hard to believe that something like this would break through the Disney information blockade.

Turns out it is, indeed, a fake, though it’s a good one, lining up nicely with the concept floating out there, and wedges a blurred Iron Man into the background. Turns out it was too good.

But, like that fake post-credits scene from a while back, this fake seems to “get it” in the way previous studio attempts haven’t, and we can only hope that the reality is as good as the unauthorized imaginings of creative fans.