Fantastic Four: Things From the Trailer That Didn’t Make the Movie

After months of bad buzz had made Fantastic Four seem doomed (no pun intended), the first trailer for the film was released back in January and…well, hell, it actually looked pretty promising.

Yeah, it seemed like it was tonally a far cry from what most fans would associate with the characters and property, but it certainly didn’t look like the disaster many were expecting. Both the premise and characterizations seemed fairly on-point, too.

So…what happened?

Well, there are dueling narratives at this point as to just how we got to a 9% Rotten Tomatoes Score, but one thing that’s clear is that there were two visions for this film: the director’s, and the studio’s. Which was represented by what moments in both the film and the trailer wasn’t always clear — but it’s easy to see that bits of the trailers never made it into the film at all.

Here’s what we noticed; let us know if we missed a shot or a line, or if some of these appeared in the film and we missed it.

Dr. Storm’s voiceover

It set the tone for the first teaser trailer, but there was none of it.

Many of those establishing shots weren’t used, either, including the car on the long, winding country highway. We suspect it must have been planned for use at one point, and not just file footage, since that road appears to be the same one later imperiled by Doom’s attack.

Ben at the batting cage

We do see him playing ball — alone, and in the dark — at one point in the film, but we don’t see him at the batting cages with a helmet on, as he’s seen in the first teaser. Weirdly, that image was used as the default image for Jamie Bell’s take on Ben Grimm for a long while.

Cradling her brother

I could be wrong on this one, since the setup for the scene — Johnny being “extinguished” by debris on Doomworld — happened in the film. This, though, doesn’t look familiar and as far as I can remember. The abrupt final battle only featured Sue and Johnny using their powers in the other dimension; I don’t believe Johnny ever lost consciousness, nor did he ever flame off.

Red/Green

For some reason, the red radiation on Planet Zero became green in post-production. Not sure why.

What’s coming?

In the teaser trailer, Victor tells Reed that “the answers” are coming. In the second trailer, “Doom” is coming. It seems likely that these disparate answers to a fairly simple question are indicative of the significantly-altered take on the film as production progressed…but obviously both of them can’t be in the movie.

Question and Answer

Reed Richards knows “answers to questions we don’t even know to ask yet,” says Franklin Storm in one trailer. In the film, though, it’s Planet Zero that carries with it the promise of those answers.

Sue’s introduction

In the trailer, Professor Storm tells someone that “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Sue.” She’s in the lab at the Baxter Building at that point. We didn’t get anyone introduced to Sue that I can remember in the lab, although that same line-read was the one spoken at the science fair, where she met Reed.

The Thing in action

The Thing dropping out of the helicopter, and The Thing about to pound Doom on the ground were two “Hell yeah!’ moments that got many fans excited when the trailers debuted. When the movie came, though, those two images were not among the relatively small number of shots we got of The Thing in action.

Fantastic Four is now playing in theaters everywhere.