ANT-MAN Director Peyton Reed's FANTASTIC FOUR Pitch Should Have Been Green Lit by Fox



ANT-MAN is now in theaters and director Peyton Reed has also been talking about his original pitch for FANTASTIC FOUR. Sadly, it sounds like 20th Century Fox messed up by not listening to Reed's pitch and green lit it because it sounds much better than the first movie by Tim Story (no offense Tim).

Here's what Reed told FilmSchoolRejects:

“Visually, one of the things we always talked about — and this was 2003 — was The Fantastic Four as daytime superheroes. They don’t have secret identities. They’re very much a part of the fabric of Manhattan. In that universe, if you go to New York to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty or the Baxter Building, it was all a part of that. We talked about it being a ’60s period movie, but Fox at the time was not into it. 
“We wanted to do a structure that was like [the movie] A Hard Day’s Night. At the beginning of a working day in Manhattan, you’re in line at Starbucks and someone runs in, ‘Hey, the Fantastic Four is fighting right around the corner!’ People run out of Starbucks and the camera flies around the corner to this splash page imagery, where the Human Torch is flying, The Thing is fighting, and it’s just chaos. Really, Joss’ first Avengers movie had that feel — it’s broad daylight. There was a time when you just didn’t have the technology, so a lot of those fights took place at night. We thought having it take place in the city during the day would’ve been a lot of fun. They were kind of modern celebrities. There were a lot of different versions of it, but that was a movie I really wanted to make.”

Things like this are always easier to have an opinion on in retrospect and it's even easier to say that Fox f***ed up on passing on Reed's pitch. It sounds so much better than the version of the FANTASTIC FOUR that Fox went with.