Movies - TV
1994’s Unreleased Fantastic Four Movie Was Always Intended To Be A Disaster
By MAX EVRY
The 2015 documentary "Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four" lets us take a look back at the reasons why "The Fantastic Four" failed terribly in 1994.
In 1983, German filmmaker Bernd Eichinger met with Stan Lee to purchase an option on the film rights to the "Fantastic Four" characters, but the price tag was incredibly high.
Eichinger met with Roger Corman, who made his name on making movies quick and cheap but with an eye for talent. His goal was to make the movie with less than a million dollars.
The cast was Alex Hyde-White as Mr. Fantastic, Rebecca Staab as Invisible Woman, Jay Underwood as Human Torch, Michael Bailey Smith as Ben Grimm, and Joseph Culp as Dr. Doom.
The cast became broadly aware that this "Fantastic Four" movie would not be as big a production as they were imagining because they were suspiciously filming through Christmas.
The practical suit made for the Thing was accurate, but everything from the costumes, story, and villains of the movie was laughably low quality.
When the ultra-rushed 22-day filming schedule was completed by the end of January 1993, post-production efforts suddenly ground to a halt. The studio stopped funding the film.
Stan Lee, in discussing his disappointment in the production, stated, "Our lawyers just gave the rights to Roger Corman to do the movie. There will be no other projects like that."
Avi Arad, the Marvel Entertainment chief at the time, decided to give Eichinger a settlement check to ease the pain of halting the movie.