The New Fantastic Four Will Suck, but not Because of Reshoots.

The internet seems to be getting itself in a tizzy again because the new Fantastic Four film is going in for series of reshoots after a screening for executives at Fox. Other "news" organizations love to paint this as some sort of bad omen that the movie is so bad that they need to go and fix everything before it's too late. That the director has failed miserably at his job, or that the studio executives are sticking their noses in where they don't belong.

This is bullshit.


Here is a short list of some movies, just off the top of my head, that have had extended periods of reshoots:

EVERY LORD OF THE RINGS MOVIE
EVERY X-MEN MOVIE (The good and the bad)
THE TWO NEW STAR TREK MOVIES
THE AVENGERS
HELL, ALL OF THE MARVEL MOVIES

Those are just some of the recent and "geeky" examples that I thought up off the top of my head. Most of the movies you've seen have had some form of reshoots. In fact, the last bad movie you saw was the film that didn't do any reshoots due to time, or money, or dumb producers and directors.

There is a wide variety of reasons to do reshoots. Maybe the director thought of a better way to shoot a certain sequence, maybe there was a rush one day and they forgot to get an important close up of a character picking something up (the term for reshoots in the business is actually "pickups" for this very reason), or even something as simple as the camera's failing during an important moment. Maybe a scene isn't working and they want to fix it.

Now admittedly, yes, sometimes there is something fundamentally wrong with a film that requires big change. Even if this is true, isn't it better that they have identified the flaw and are making efforts to fix it?

Reshoots for a film are never cause for alarm. Ever. They are a normal part of the film making process, especially in summer tent pole films. Just because the Fantastic Four is going in for reshoots, doesn't mean it's going to suck.

It's going to suck because Doctor Doom is going to be a blogger, not a scientist or even the malevolent dictator of a fictional eastern European nation. It's going to suck because the members of the Fantastic Four that are supposed to be related clearly are not (no problem with the characters being a different race, but they clearly aren't related and I have no idea why they need to be adopted siblings or half siblings) (Actually, that one's not that big of a deal to me. -Ed) It's going to suck because, despite the success of Chronicle, it was a marginal success rooted firmly in the "found footage" genre that is finally seeing its rightful decline. It's going to suck because Jamie Bell is as skinny as a rail and will never be a convincing Thing. It's going to suck because the cast were told to not read the comics, because they do not have any bearing on the plot of the movie.

So the fact that the movie is going in for a few days of reshoots is not the reason this movie is going to suck. The complete lack of understanding of the source material and a shoddy director is why this movie is going to suck.

Kyle Johannessen is the resident angry geek at the Ace of Geeks, as well as being a film director, writer and producer in the Boston area. You can find some examples of his work at Transparent Frog Films. His absolute favorite writer in the world is Stephanie Mayer, and he should really remember to write his own bios.

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