'Fantastic Four' Concept Art Shows A Design For Doctor Doom's Castle On Planet Zero
There's a typical cycle for many major summer films, where the initial marketing gives way to a deluge of last-minute materials, with the post-release zone made interesting by the reveal of concept art and, frequently, alternate designs for various elements of the movie. We see this for Marvel movies all the time, and for many others as well.
Which is to say that, even if Fantastic Four had been a big hit without any tales of backstage drama, we'd be in the place now where we'd start to see concept art like the pieces below. In this case, it just happens that this Fantastic Four concept art, by Steve Jung, features one element many people would have liked to see in the film: the castle home of Doctor Doom.
Steve Jung posted this art to Facebook. It is early art, dated 2013, when some of the film's concepts were pretty clearly set. This take on Planet Zero isn't massively different from what we see in the final film.
Here's what Jung had to say about the art:
I was on this one early on before all the drama happened... none of my work made it to the movie (kinda glad) since it got changed many times after I left the project. Exploration of the Planet Zero and Victor's castle ideations. Btw the texture of the terrain is cigarette buds from a picture of the director's ashtray.
And in a comment on the image featuring the halls of the castle, Jung said,
The castle is made out of particles so in some places you can see through and Victor is holding everything together in his mind...
While Doctor Doom's comic book home of Latveria was in the early draft of the film, it seems like this art is all from a point where Doom's home was only set up on Planet Zero after he meets his first "death" there — the second comment from Jung suggests that the Four are walking the halls of a Planet Zero version of Doom's castle that the villain has created for himself out of whole cloth.
In the final film we don't even get that much from Doom, who is found in on Planet Zero with his old gear fused to his body. Clearly he has made some sort of a home there, and considers it his ruling seat, but we never get to see other characters explore whatever structure he may have created for himself.