Marvel is going toreboot Fantastic Fourat some point and we may have a solid candidate for the job. Matthew Vaughn, director ofThe Kingsmanmovies, has thrown his hat in the ring. Or, at the very least, he’s expressed interested in taking on Marvel’s first family, assuming he gets to tell the story the way he wants to tell it.
Matthew Vaughn, who has helmed more than his share of comic book movies in the past, made the trek to New York Comic-Con this weekend to promoteThe King’s Man, the upcomingKingsmanprequel. During an interview, he was asked about the possibility of directing the forthcomingFantastic Fourreboot. Here’s what Vaughn had to say about it.
“Yeah I’ve always loved the idea of doingFantastic Fouras it was originally written. I mean it’s one of my favorite comics and I actually think that Fantastic Four, as a nice piece of IP, is in theory as big as Spider-Man. I think those, the values of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, I think those are the reason, if you’re a kid, you can imagine being a part of the Fantastic Four family and you can imagine being Peter Parker. So yeah, I think Fan-Four would be the one that would excite me the most.”
The “as it was originally written” bit is particularly important. That implies Matthew Vaughn wants to stay very faithful to the versions of the characters brought to us by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Previous iterations of the franchise have been modestly successful at best, but 2015’sFantastic Fourwas a truly massive bomb, and none of the live-action adaptations to date have truly captured the potential that these characters have. Be it Vaughn or someone else, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige isn’t going to squander this opportunity.
Disney’s merger with Fox allowed theX-Men and Fantastic Four rightsto wind up in Kevin Feige’s hands. While we’re still years away from these characters being rebooted within the MCU, it was announced during SDCC 2019 over the summer that those projects are very much in the cards.Phase 4 will take us through 2021and all of the movies and TV shows for the next couple of years have already been firmed up. So we won’t see Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm back on the silver screen until, at the very earliest, 2022.
Matthew Vaughn previously directedKick-AssandX-Men: First Class, outside of theKingsmanmovies. So he knows his way around a comic book adaptation. Next up, he’s gotKingsman 3, which is technically being made for Disney, given the Fox merger. If that goes well, perhaps that could put him on deck for anMCUgig. Though,Ant-Mandirector Peyton Reed also wanted to make aFantastic Fourmovie at one point and one has to wonder if Marvel would give him a crack at it. Either way, this is a property that big-name filmmakers are very interested in. This news comes to us viaComicbook.com.
