The Hulk got his big movie. Spider-Man and the X-Men are both working on their third. Daredevil got one, Blade got one (and then two sequels) - even the Punisher got two. But for years, the Fantastic Four have stood by while later and lesser characters from the Marvel Comics lineup got the full Hollywood treatment. To those who care deeply (too much, really) about such things, the neglect is bewildering; after all, the Fantastic Four were the first Marvel superheroes of the Stan Lee era, the foundation upon which his so-called House of Ideas was built. It was the Fantastic Four who established the Marvel trademark of sympathetic, all-too-human heroes, paving the way for all those poor Peter Parkers who followed. Not to mention that, well, a movie with Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing would just rock.
Come July 8, they finally make it to the big screen, when 20th Century Fox releases its $100 million adaptation of The Fantastic Four.
For Fox and its producing partner, Marvel Studios, Fantastic Four isn’t just a movie; it’s their best chance to turn the last superstars in the Marvel pantheon into a global franchise, with all the videogames, action figures, and assorted billions in ancillary revenue that follow. As Marvel Studios CEO Avi Arad put it at a Bear Stearns media conference, "It’s a tent pole film that supports all our brands and every area of our business." The hope is that Fantastic Four will become a mass event like the first Spider-Man, which generated $115 million in ticket sales on its opening weekend. The risk, though, is they’ll find themselves with a flop, another disappointment like The Hulk or The Punisher.
Arad has one advantage at the outset: the fanboys who’ve been waiting decades for this movie. The fanboys are every marketer’s dream. With conventions and Web sites devoted to their beloved comic books, they’re potent tools for spreading buzz and a possible lodestone for a general audience. "Going directly to the fans is the best marketing tool," Arad says. "We love them and we want to hear what they have to say." The fanboys, of course, are notoriously capricious - unscrupulous even - toward anyone who deigns to mess with their comic books. With Fantastic Four, though, Arad insists he’s won them over. "Even Fat Harry has to admit there’s something cooking," he boasts, referring to Harry Knowles, presiding geek at Ain’t It Cool News, the most influential of all the movie-gossip sites.
For such a promising property, Fantastic Four has taken a hard road to the megaplex, with more than a decade of false starts, rewrites, and bad luck. As most comic fans can tell you, in 1992 B-movie king Roger Corman rushed into production a low-budget adaptation of the story. That film, to Arad’s relief, never made it to theaters. (Arad subsequently acquired and burned the negative, though bootlegs are a hot commodity online.) After Fox picked up the rights, the project slipped into a decade of development hell, with one director after another, from Chris Columbus (who helmed the first two Harry Potters) to Down With Love’s Peyton Reed joining and then abandoning the project. Meanwhile, screenwriter after screenwriter - at least 10 in all - took a crack at the script. It wasn’t until last August that Fox finally had a screenplay, a credible cast including Sin City’s Jessica Alba and The Shield’s Michael Chiklis, and Tim Story as director. Story had emerged from USC film school a few years earlier to direct Barbershop, a surprise 2002 hit for MGM that - significantly for Fox’s franchise hopes - spawned two sequels.
Still, even with the pieces finally in place, the fanboy response was tepid. Lacking any comic book or sci-fi credentials, Story drew a stream of online invective from rabid followers who pronounced the film a disaster before a single frame had been shot. (In Story’s defense, Arad notes that Bryan Singer was similarly castigated in 1996 when hired to direct the first X-Men movie; now, Arad says, comic fans consider him "the son of God.") It didn’t help when USA Today published the first images of the cast in costume. The photos fueled a rant by Knowles on Ain’t It Cool News: "There’s utterly nothing fantastic about them," he groused, comparing the costumes with those in Corman’s schlockfest.
The years on the shelf clearly took a toll. By early this year, Fantastic Four reeked like any once-hot Hollywood property that had gone through so much doctoring. As one screenwriter who looked at an early version of the Fantastic Four script told me, "Let’s be honest. It’s going to suck donkey balls."
If the early buzz wasn’t enough to terrify Fox, there’s this: The movie hits theaters in one of the most competitive summers in years. The season has promised to be a "bloodbath," says New Line marketing president Russell Schwartz - a frenzied logjam of would-be blockbusters, from the last Star Wars in May to Batman Begins in June to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds in July, every one of them backed by huge advertising and marketing budgets.
To stand out from the crowd, Fox and Marvel built the Fantastic Four release around a simple refrain: Take the number 4 and repeat. Arad had been pondering a Fourth of July opening date for years; Fox successfully deployed a similar strategy for Independence Day, shortened to ID4, released the weekend of July 4, 1996. But the gimmick was punctured when Paramount thumbtacked War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise, to the same weekend. After a six-month standoff, Fox blinked, bouncing Fantastic Four a week to July 8 (which, in turn, forced the Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman comedy, Bewitched, to late June). Even superheroes, it seems, have only so much power in Hollywood.
The first few panels of The Fantastic Four #1, which arrived on newsstands in 1961, show the irascible pilot Ben Grimm and his crew - aerospace whiz Reed Richards, his frosty fiancée, Sue Storm, and her hot-tempered brother, Johnny Storm - rocketing into orbit in a desperate effort to beat the Russians to the stars. Suddenly - RAK TAC TAC TAC!! - the astronauts are pummeled with cosmic rays that scramble their DNA, turning them into mutants with superpowers.
Their misfortune has made them especially beloved characters in the Marvel lineup; they’re the quintessential "heroes with hang-ups," to use Stan Lee’s phrase. Even as hipper franchises like the X-Men captured audiences in the ’80s and ’90s, the Fantastic Four remained a venerated property, the heroes’ modest exploits - and their nemesis, Dr. Victor von Doom - instilling a passionate following. For years, The Fantastic Four was more popular than The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, or Captain America. Never out of print, it has sold more than 150 million comic books around the world.
It’s this passion that Arad needs to exploit. As Marvel’s movie production chief, he spends weeks every year pressing the flesh with the comic book-nerd elite at festivals like Comic-Con in San Diego and Wizard World in Los Angeles. At each stop, he fields questions from fans and weighs their interest in the company’s library of 5,000 villains and superheroes. "What’s the status of the Killraven script?" "Is Deathlok still in development?"
Before he joined Marvel, Arad invented toys for the preschool set, novelties with names like Rollerblade Baby and My Pretty Ballerina. Today, fully one-quarter of Marvel’s revenue comes from toys - a fact that is immediately clear to anyone who sets foot in Arad’s headquarters, every square inch stocked with action figures and trinkets.
Arad, 57, an Israeli-migré who collects motorcycles, dresses entirely in black, and lets his rottweiler run loose through his Century City office, is as wary as the fanboys of a misfire. "This community is so nervous about Fantastic Four," Arad told me. "For years, we’ve gone through the heartache of the market saying is the movie really happening?"
Now that it is, Marvel has an audience unhealthily obsessed with what Hollywood will make of their childhood heroes. This is the same crowd, after all, that camped in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood for weeks before Revenge of the Sith - even though the movie wasn’t going to open at that particular theater. And it’s the same crowd that has built a formidable network of gossip sites devoted to their heroes, with names like Comics Continuum, Superhero Hype!, and the Inland Empire Strikes Back. As superconductors for movie rumors and news, some of the sites generate thousands of dollars in Internet ads and as many as 3 million hits a month. "There is a hardcore fan base that’s very invested," says Fox’s copresident of marketing, Pam Levine. "You have to respect that."
And fear it. These fans come loaded with high expectations and hypersensitivity to any perceived misstep. On September 18, Ain’t It Cool News published a blistering critique of a Fantastic Four rewrite allegedly penned by Simon Kinberg (screenwriter for the forthcoming X-Men 3). But it was an old, pre-Kinberg script, long since discarded. No matter - another fillip of bad buzz had entered the ether.
To capture these must-have fanboys, Fox has given the fan sites a level of access rarely granted even to the mainstream media. The strategy is to offer them "everything first," Levine says, "giving them enough unique content and building on their interest while trying to expand on it." The studio feverishly monitored online chatter, feeding the fan sites scraps of news and concept art at strategic intervals. It sent the cast to comic book conventions where publicists distributed plastic vials of "cosmic dust." And last October, the studio held a junket for what it termed "genre media" - the fanboy sites. With filming under way, correspondents were flown to the set in Vancouver and put up at - where else? - the Four Seasons, with some travel expenses covered by the studio. They saw a replica of the Baxter Building, the Four’s fictitious Manhattan high-rise headquarters, and a scale model of the Brooklyn Bridge, the location of one of the film’s most dramatic action sequences. They were allowed to interview the director and cast and were given exclusive images from the film to post on their sites.
The effort resulted in a smattering of good coverage. "After the junket, a lot of people eased off on their criticism of Tim Story," notes Inland Empire Strikes Back proprietor Robert Sanchez. Indiana Sev, a correspondent for JoBlo’s Movie Emporium who’d been skeptical of the project, pronounced the movie "as promising a venture as Spider-Man and X-Men." (The fanboy junkets are catching on; Warner Bros. is considering sending more than a dozen comic geeks all the way to Australia to visit the set of Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns.)
But as the weeks ticked by, it became clear that the junket didn’t quell the bitching. "Studio dweebs felt [the movie] needed to be hipped up and sexed up and systematically fucked a once great script with good directors attached, and reduced it to a hack helmed unfinanced quickie," ranted Knowles on Ain’t It Cool News in late April. (So much for getting Fat Harry on board.) "The fans’ expectations are too high," Comics Continuum founder Rob Allstetter says. Allstetter, who’s also the deputy sports editor of the Detroit News, has been tracking comic book movies for years; he even visited Corman’s low-rent Fantastic Four set back in the early ’90s. "Fanboys are pretty fickle," Allstetter says. "These are people who went nuts because Spider-Man had organic webbing."
The fanboy campaign went prime-time on January 14, when the first trailer was shipped to some 3,200 theaters with another Marvel movie, Elektra. It seemed like the perfect pairing, a great way to introduce Fantastic Four to its target audience. But Elektra proved to be Marvel Studios’ biggest flop ever, selling just $12.8 million in tickets on its opening weekend, barely enough for fifth place behind Coach Carter and Racing Stripes. The failure of Elektra, which went on to gross just $24 million, stung Avi Arad. Two months later, he referred to the character as if she were a deceased family member and wore an Elektra wristband as a memento. "This is like saying kaddish for her," he told me. (A few months later, Fox attached the all-important final Fantastic Four trailer to reels of Revenge of the Sith, the most coveted platform of the season - and one last chance to catch the fanboy crowd.)
The Elektra fiasco offered several lessons: Obsessive-compulsive disorder isn’t the sexiest character flaw to give your heroine; don’t spin off a movie from a lame Ben Affleck vehicle like Daredevil. But the most important takeaway has been that courting comic book fans is only part of the game. While whiny fanboys can help sink a flop, pleasing them is not enough to ensure a hit. "If you take Fantastic Four," Arad says, "we get our community at hello. They love it or hate it, but they’re coming. The rest of the world needs to be educated."
That means preparing the massive marketing push any would-be summer blockbuster demands. Fox has secured more sponsorship partners for Fantastic Four than for any film in the studio’s history - including either X-Men movie or even the final chapters of Star Wars. SBC will create Fantastic Four TV, print, and radio ads. Burger King will air its own Fantastic Four commercials for both adults and kids. Kraft will hawk Fantastic Four Lunchables. Chiklis will appear as the Thing in TV spots for Samsung phones, delivering the craven tagline, "It’s fantastic!"
The mainstream push also means wooing a group of influence peddlers far removed from the fanboys: theater owners. That means ShoWest, the annual motion picture industry convention/boondoggle. Held each spring, ShoWest is the classic Hollywood power orgy - four days in Vegas of meetings, golf, steak dinners, star-studded screenings, and parties with showgirls. Oh, and along the way, the theater industry’s ruling elite decides what movies will play in the nation’s 6,000 theaters.
This year, Fox made its pitch with an hour-long, celebrity-heavy presentation emceed by studio chairs Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos. A splashy highlight reel previewed Fox’s upcoming lineup, from Fever Pitch to Mr. and Mrs. Smith to the biggest picture of the season, Revenge of the Sith. At last, it was time for Fantastic Four. Facing thousands of exhibitors in a hotel ballroom, standing on a long stage bathed in aqua lights, Rothman cited the average opening weekend box office gross for the four X-Men and Spider-Man movies - $85 million. "A statistic to warm your hearts," he said. "And this summer, at long last, brings the only property in the world bigger than either X-Men or Spider-Man."
With that, a white panel slid to the side, a plume of smoke rose from the stage like a blast of steam from a subway vent, the hip hop classic "Fantastic Voyage" began booming from the sound system, and out stepped the cast of the movie. Chiklis, flanked by his Fantastic costars, strode jauntily to the podium. "Well, folks, there’s not much more to say, except …," he declared, before dropping his voice several octaves and delivering the Thing’s signature line: "It’s clobberin’ time!"
Jonathan Bing (jbing@reedbusiness.com) is the deputy managing editor of Variety.
credit Embry Rucker
Ités clobberiné time: CEO Avi Arad is working the fanboys on and off the Web.-Even Fat Harryé-aka Ainét It Cool Newsé Harry Knowles-éhas to admit something is cooking.é
credit 20th Century Fox
Four better or worse: Our heroes-played by Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd, Chris Evans, and Michael Chiklis-set their sights on July 8.
credit Marvel comics
Fantastic voyage: The debut issue of "the greatest comic magazine in the world"
credit Christian and Kimberly
Fans at Februaryés MegaCon in Orlando
A shocking scene from Roger Cormanés never-released movie
