Fantastic Four: Other Directors Considered Revealed

Fantastic Four is reportedly close to inking WandaVision director Matt Shakman to helm the project. But, the other directors in the running have been revealed. The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit told fans that Michael Matthews and Reid Carolin were in the hunt. Carolin directed the first two Magic Mike movies, 22 Jump Street, and White House Down. The reporter indicated that Matthews was really the one who came down to the wire with the WandaVision director. It would have been interesting to see what he could have done on a massive budget as his latest movie was Love and Monsters with Dylan O’Brien. 

However, all of this is for naught because Shakman seems like he’s going to get the job. After speculation that Marvel Studios was going big-game hunting, they went with an in-house choice. WandaVision is one of the most touted Disney+ shows since the streaming platform’s inception. It’s an understandable pick for a property that holds the weight that Fantastic Four does in Marvel lore. Nothing is concrete yet, but the speculation will rage on. 

Fans are still wondering what shape a Fantastic Four story will take in the MCU. Expectations would indicate that an origin story would be in order, but Feige says that’s not what’s coming. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter he shut the origin story talk down.

“A lot of people know this origin story,” Feige said at San Diego Comic-Con. “A lot of people know the basics. How do we take that and bring something that they’ve never seen before… We’ve set a very high bar for ourselves with bringing that to the screen.”

Comicbook.com had the chance to speak to the executive in San Diego as well. When asked about what they had learned from Phase 4 of the MCU, he pointed out the fact that the Avengers experience is truly special. It’s a long journey and fans are going to have to wait for that big payoff.

“I think we learn something on every project we do, but as we were laying out, even three years ago here laying out Phase Four, which we didn’t lay out all of, but most of, we realized that it’s very different than Phase One, Two and Three, that that there are more projects in less years, and therefore it didn’t seem right, you’re not going to culminate every 10 months in an Avengers movie,” Feige explained. “And each of the films themselves now have become quite big and are crossover events in many ways. And after, you know, the creative experience we had with Infinity War and Endgame, it felt like it was about capping a saga, saving back-to-back Avengers films for the completion of a saga and that’s really what we wanted to lay out today.

Do you wish one of the other choices had gotten a chance at Fantastic Four? Let us know down in the comments!