Today’s the day comic book fans have dreamed of–or dreaded–for years. Marvel’s original Sliver Age superteam makes its long-awaited MCU debut in Disney’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, starring Vanessa Kirby (Invisible Woman), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Thing), Pedro Pascal (Mr. Fantastic), and Joseph Quinn (Human Torch). Oddly, it seems as though Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s heroic quartet pops up on the big screen like clockwork every 10 years or so.
It was 2015 when Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Miles Teller played the FF in Chronicle director Josh Trank’s ill-received reboot known as “Fant4stic.” A decade before that, it was Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis, Chris Evans, and Ioan Gruffudd in Tim Story’s Fantastic Four and the 2007 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. And in 1994, the foursome of Alex Hyde-White, Michael Bailey Smith, Rebecca Staab, and Jay Underwood thrilled audiences worldwide in…well, actually, they never officially got the chance to thrill anybody. You see, the very first Fantastic Four feature film was shelved before its premiere. The cast and crew fell victim to a plot more diabolical than anything Dr. Doom, the Mole Man, or the Red Ghost ever conceived.
The story’s origins lie in the mid-1980s, when the only example of a Marvel Comics character getting an original movie was Howard the Duck. The film rights to the FF were sold in 1986 to German producer Bernd Eichinger’s Constantin Film for a reported $250,000. By the early ’90s Constantin had failed to reach a deal with any major Hollywood studio (despite the success of 1989’s Batman) and the rights were set to revert to Marvel at the end of 1992. Eager to retain what he thought was a valuable property, Eichinger turned to New Concorde Pictures, founded by B-movie auteur and infamous pinchpenny Roger Corman, to produce a picture as quickly and frugally as possible.
Production on The Fantastic Four began in the Fall of 1992, with principal photography taking place over most of December that year. The screenplay followed college students Reed Richards (Hyde-White), Ben Grimm (Smith), and Victor Von Doom (Joseph Culp) working on a science project linked to a passing comet dubbed Colossus. The experiment goes awry, seemingly killing Von Doom. Ten years later, Reed and Ben, accompanied by siblings Susan (Staab) and Johnny (Underwood) Storm, take off in a prototype spaceship to study the returning Colossus.
As fate would have it, the diamond needed to help power their rocket is snatched by a rodent-faced gem thief known as the Jeweler (Ian Trigger), a character originally meant to be subterranean supervillain Mole Man. As a result, an in-flight mishap exposes the foursome to cosmic radiation, and when they return to Earth they discover they’ve gained unearthly powers.
The soldiers who take the group prisoner after their crash landing turn out to be underlings of Victor, who not only survived the earlier accident but now rules the kingdom of Latveria as the armored monarch Dr. Doom. The team uses their newfound abilities to escape, but the not-so-good Doctor devises a plan to transfer the FF’s powers to him as part of his scheme for global domination. Can our heroes stop him and prevent…Doomsday?
The movie was reportedly made for a Cormanesque $1 million, and after watching it that figure seems somewhat inflated. The effects–such as the animation used for Johnny’s Human Torch or Mr. Fantastic’s “elastic” limbs–are straight out of a 1940s Columbia serial. The dialogue detours into Batman ’66 campiness more than it should, and the production is dark and confined when it should be bright and expansive (budget costs again, I’m sure). Still, the performances are generally good and the costumes–including Smith’s animatronic Thing mask–are better than one might expect. There was a clear effort put into the project, which makes what happened to it all the sadder.
It was announced that The Fantastic Four would open on Labor Day weekend 1993, a date which got pushed back to January of 1994 as a benefit premiere at the Mall of America. Trailers for the film were released, and the stars appeared at the San Diego Comic-Con to promote the picture. A few months before the scheduled debut, however, it was announced that all release plans were cancelled and the actors received notices telling them to stop any and all publicity.
Over 30 year after the film was shelved, controversy remains over what happened. Marvel guru Stan Lee stated that Eichinger and Corman’s picture was made solely to retain the rights in anticipation a future deal, a statement that both producers denied. “It was not our [original] intention to make a B movie, that’s for sure,” Eichinger said in an interview, “but when the movie was there, we wanted to release it.” He also stated that Marvel executive Avi Arad feared the picture’s low-budget look would come off as shoddy and damage future prospects for the franchise. Whatever the plans were, the film was sold back to Marvel for a multi-million-dollar sum.
Even though the 1994 Fantastic Four never got its release, it found new life on the the comics convention circuit as a bootleg curiosity and, later, as an online discovery. A 2015 documentary, Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four, features interviews with the principal players and creative team. Constantin Film and Eichinger got credit as producers on Fox’s three FF features. And as for stars Hyde-White, Smith, Staab, and Underwood, they all have cameo appearances in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Sometimes it takes a while for heroes to receive their just rewards.