Hollywood is full of almosts and might have beens. For every movie and television series that makes it to the screen, there are numerous others that don’t. Sometimes they are projects that simple never make it out of development. Other times, they’re projects that die during production or are shelved right at the finish line for various reasons — as was the case with Batgirl when Warner Bros. Decided to use the film as a tax write off. And then there’s a film that was on the cusp of release when the whole thing was stopped from being released and has since become something of a legend of superhero cinema — and the journey started 33 years ago today.
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On December 28, 1992, principal photography on Roger Corman’s doomed Fantastic Four movie officially began under the direction of music video director Oley Sassone. It would last for between 21 and 25 days and was shot on the Concorde Pictures sound stage in Venice, California as well as in a few relatively nearby locations, most notably the former Pacific Stock Exchange building in downtown Los Angeles and the Loyola Marymount University campus. While the finished product — which was given a May 31, 1994 release date before it was pulled — never officially saw the light of day, it’s become a legend for comic book movie fans and even with the Fantastic Four finally getting their big screen moment later on (and most recently with The Fantastic Four: First Steps) we still wish this doomed production could get its time to truly shine.
The 1990s Fantastic Four Was a Weird Project From the Very Start
The story goes back to 1986 when German film producer Bernd Eichinger obtained the movie options for the Fantastic Four through his company, Constantin Film. However, budget was an issue, and the movie didn’t get made right away. With the option about to expire at the end of 1992 — on December 31st of that year to be exact — Eichner moved to hold onto the film option with a low-budget Fantastic Four film. In September 1992, he hired B-movie filmmaker Roger Corman on the film and production began on December 28th. With production underway and distribution through Corman’s New Horizons Pictures lined up, the deadline to retain the option for Fantastic Four had been averted.
The movie came together quickly and promotion began pretty quickly. There were trailers in the summer of 1993 both in theaters and attached to the video release of two of Corman’s mother movies. The film’s cast hired a publicist and did further promotion, and a premiere was announced for the Mall of America on January 19, 1994, but then it was all cancelled. The story as to why has varied. Stan Lee claimed in 2005 that the film as never meant to be released at all and was done entirely for Eichinger to maintaining rights. Corman denied those claims and said his contract to release the film had been bought out by Eichinger and Eichinger himself said Lee’s version of things was not true and that the movie was going to be released and said that then-Marvel executive and future Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad had actually been the one to step in. As it turns out, Arad wasn’t aware of the movie and when a fan’s excitement clued him in, he stepped in to purchase the film and ordered all prints destroyed, concerned about how a low budget film might impact the brand. Whatever the exact scenario, the end of the 1990s Fantastic Four film ended up giving birth to a legend.
Despite Never Being Released, You Can Watch the 1990s Fantastic Four
Obviously, the doomed film wasn’t the end of the Fantastic Four’s journey to the big screen. Eichinger would go on to produce both 2005’s Fantastic Four and its 2007 sequel. 20th Century Fox attempted to reboot the series in 2015, but that film did poorly and the rights to the Fantastic Four ended up with Disney thanks to their acquisition of Fox in 2019 ultimately leading to The Fantastic Four: First Steps this year. That film brought the team into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and even saw the four main actors from the doomed 1994 film — Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underood, and Michael Bailey Smith — make cameo appearances.
But while the actual 1994 Fantastic Four film has never made it to the silver screen, that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it — if you know where to look. The film has popped up online in various places over the years and, as of the time of this article’s writing, is available on the Internet Archive. It’s bright, it’s a little silly, and it’s certainly not a high budget affair, but it’s a surprising amount of fun and we still hope it will someday get its chance to shine.
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Image courtesy of Tor Books/Macmillan -
Official art by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme
