Throwback Thursday: 1994's The Fantastic Four

With a new Fantastic Four movie in theatres, it feels like a good time to look back at the first time a studio tried to turn Marvel's First Family into a movie. Like, the very first time. Ten years before Fox released their modern stab a Fantastic Four film, a German production company made their own low budget Fantastic Four movie, which Marvel swept under the rug before it ever hit theatres. That was a mistake on Marvel's part, however, as they should have cast it into the Negative Zone.

So what's the story with this obscure footnote in Marvel movie lore? In 1985, the German production company Constantin Films purchased the rights to make a Fantastic Four film, with the movie rights reverting back to Marvel if no movie was under production by the end of 1992. Although Constantin Films tried to attract the interest of major studios like Warner Bros. to finance the film, they couldn't find any buyers due to the high cost of making a superhero film. With time running out, Constantin Films decided to film a Fantastic Four movie of their own with a low budget of $1 million. Filming began on December 28, 1992, three days before the rights were to revert back to Marvel. Constantin hired Roger Corman, a famed B-movie director known for his low budget films like The Children of the Corn, to produce the movie and film it over the course of 21 days.

Spoiler alert: The film was a mess. While faithful to the comics (Doctor Doom's origin is ripped straight out of Fantastic Four Annual #2 and the team's fateful trip into space received only minor changes), the story was a mess. Reed Richard forms his rocket crew using his college roommate and his ex-landlord's children, none of whom show any signs of being qualified for space travel. Besides facing Doctor Doom, the Fantastic Four also fought a Mole Man substitute named the Jeweler, who enjoyed quoting Shakespeare and kidnapping Alicia Masters. And the romance between Reed and Susan Storm take a creepy turn from the outset, since Susan has harbored a crush on Reed since childhood (yes, that was originally a plot point from the comics, but it's still creepy!). As for the team name, Susan and Johnny's mother came up with it after she let her old tenant turn her children into freaks of nature. Perhaps she was trying to find a silver lining for the entire catastrophe.

With a minuscule budget, the special effects were predictably cheap. The Thing was a stuntman in a rubber suit, the sets were empty rooms with a piece of furniture sitting in the corner, and the lightning and fire animations would have made Hanna-Barbera cringe. The costumes were a joke, too, looking like children's Halloween costumes made by a suburbanite on a deadline. However, the soundtrack wasn't terrible, since the music directors pitched in $6,000 to pay for an orchestra to record a score for the movie.

After Constantin completed the film, they released a trailer and planned to release the movie in fall 1993. The cast of the Fantastic Four even appeared at San Diego Comic-Con to promote it. However, after pushing the movie for months, Constantin suddenly stopped marketing the film and cancelled it all together. Years later, it came out that Marvel executive (and future Marvel movie mastermind) Avi Arad purchased the movie outright, not wanting the Fantastic Four movie franchise to be ruined by a bad B-movie. Arad ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed and so the movie was all but erased from the annals of movie history.

While the 1994 Fantastic Four movie never officially saw the light of day, bootleg copies found their way to comic conventions and eventually onto YouTube. If you have 90 minutes of free time, track it down and cringe at how awful a Fantastic Four movie can be. As for Constantin Films, they retained their rights to the Fantastic Four and eventually partnered with Fox for the 2005 Fantastic Four blockbuster they always envisioned. In fact, Constantin still has rights to the Fantastic Four movies today, all thanks to a movie they started filming three days before their contract was to expire. So, the next time you're upset because the Avengers aren't fighting Doctor Doom in a blockbuster film or Spider-Man isn't popping up to trade verbal barbs with the Human Torch, blame this laughably terrible Fantastic Four film.