The Smurfs 2 Director Raja Gosnell Reflects On His Fantastic Four Movie Involvement

Before he took Scooby Doo and Mystery Inc. into battle against Scrappy, or launched a franchise with the long-dormant Smurfs characters, director Raja Gosnell almost made Fantastic Four--one of the properties that had been floating around Hollywood for years in search of the right set of hands before it finally fell to Tim Story to produce a pair of movies that were met with audience ambivalence but made hundreds of millions of dollars. Actually, Gosnell almost did it twice; the first time, he was set up to work with Batman writer Sam Hamm, and the second was when he was handed--and turned down--the script that Story eventually made. Gosnell, currently promoting The Smurfs 2, joined us for a long conversation (check back here at 8 p.m. EST), and part of it was to talk about the FF.

ComicBook.com: You were attached at one point to Fantastic Four. How did that materialize? How close were you to doing that film? Gosnell: There were a couple of attempts to get that movie up and going. Tom Rothman ran the studio at the time and really wanted to get Fantastic Four going; he was a big fan. Chris Columbus's company, 1492, were producing and they were big fans. Sam Hamm was the writer; he's a big fan. And they brought me on and I was a fan of the project but I don't think I was quite on the level with them. I had a familiarity with the project but as I read what they were doing I got more and more involved. And so we were probably a couple of drafts in and we'd actually hired a bit of art department so there was a production designer and a couple of draftspeople working. We were working away on what the world would look like; I think we even had a costume designer coming in to sort of show us what the Fantastic Four suits looked like. Ultimately, the script came in and it was going to be too expensive for what the studio wanted to make at that point and it wasn't the script they wanted it to be so everyone took a step back to sort of retool. I ended up at that moment getting offered to go do Scooby Doo so I went to go do that and actually it did circle back around to me when I'd just finished the second Scooby Doo four years later and the studio had redeveloped the script into the movie that eventually got made. Ultimately I was super-exhausted and decided not to do it and ultimately I think Tim Story ended up doing the Fantastic Four. So that was the extent of my involvement--I was on it for a couple, three months in early pre-production and script development and it was very clear that it wasn't going to go forward with that configuration and I think everybody took a step back from it then the studio dug in and did the next draft.