Marvel's Fantastic Four

Happy 4/4 from the Fantastic Four!

Oh good God!
I've had it!

Marvel and Disney and DC and Star Trek and J.J. Abrams can shove ALL their alternate, concurrent-counter-continuity, time-travelling, other-dimensional, splinter-universe, Ultimate-version crap where the sun of counter-Earth don't shine!

Tomorrow is Alternate-Splinter-Counter-Version of the Fantastic Four day!
May 4 is Star Wars vs. the Fantastic Four day!
June 4 is Ultimate F.F. day.
July 4 is Fantastic FORCE day (a.k.a. time travelling & other-dimensional FF day).
August 4 is Future (Foundation) Fantastic Four day.
September 4 is cinematic universe F.F. day (choose your Fant4stic poison).
October 4 is race-swap F.F. day.
November 4 is Trans-F.F. day of visibility (or invisibility in Sue's case)!
December 4 is Challengers of the Unknown day!

("F" your alternate FF versions!)

Word on the street is the comic that Thing is reading in the first promo image, is an alternate universe/timeline story. Then add in the retro look of all these images, with the Human Torch image appearing to have a Jetsons’esque(?) skyline.

And if it stinks, they can say it doesn’t matter.

If it’s great, they can crossover into the main timeline.

Cake and eat it too!

I can see why they went the route of a female Silver Surfer: they've already tried the male Silver Surfer a couple of times, and the team is 3 out of 4 males, and Galactus will probably be male. The only issue I see is that franchises led by female leads tend not to do well, when we consider Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Black Widow and Harley Quinn, just to name a few recent ones.

It would be interesting to have an evil Fantastic Four. The Thing is a monster who could tear people limb from limb, Reed Richards is a super genius and can entangle people with his elastic body, Sue Storm can turn invisible and erect invincible forcefields capable of cutting people in half or cutting off their air supply, and the Human Torch is like a demon on fire.

__________________
Boldly going.

You've got to be joking. This is either a completely disingenuous mischaracterization, or something much worse.

Just to set the record straight: it is absolutely not true that female-led movies of this sort "tend not to do well" - Wonder Woman was a pretty big hit, making around $824m worldwide, and Captain Marvel did even better - $1.1 billion worldwide. The other ones you mentioned had their release negatively affected due to the pandemic theater closures, so clearly it's unfair to blame how they did on the fact that they were women-led.

Wonder Woman was a big hit, but the sequel was not. I doubt we'll see a continuation of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, nor a continuation of the Marvels or Black Widow, since they were generally panned by both critics and audiences.

The WW sequel also came out during the pandemic, in fact I remember theaters in most major cities were still shuttered, and WB even premiered it simultaneously on streaming so everybody could watch.

In any case, your assertion that "women-led movies tend not to do well" has been thoroughly debunked - some of them have been very big hits. In fact, all of the women-led CBMs that were not affected either by the pandemic closures or the actors strikes have done phenomenally well.

At this point you're just coming across as someone who just doesn't like women-led movies personally and wants to paint everything in the most negative light, so clearly actual facts will mean absolutely nothing to you.

I love heroines, including Ripley from Aliens, Uma Thurman from Kill Bill, Furiosa from Mad Max Fury Road and recently I even liked Captain Marvel and the new Black Panther. But the fact of the matter is that heroine franchises are not long lasting.
I hope I'm wrong.

Oh... oh... it... it just keeps getting worse!
(*bangs head on wall*)

Oh the pain... the pain.

The Fantastic Four is definitely not a "heroine franchise," the movie is still going to be very male-dominated.

Right. But the MCU introduces characters all the time in hopes of launching that character's own series. The Silver Surfer is a major comic book character who's been around a long time (since 1968, I believe) with his own comic book series.

I did say can. Are you not in favor of a female Silver Surfer?

I don't think that's necessarily the case, at all.

The bigger goal is to bring a bunch of disparate characters together into a "big team-up" movie, whether it's an Avengers movie or something like Thunderbolts.

A lot of the characters who have been introduced since Endgame will team up soon, either in Thunderbolts or in Avengers 5 or Avengers 6.

Alternatively, different characters can team up in a movie that is presumably just a sequel to a solo film - like Doctor Strange 2 brought together Strange, Wanda, and America Chavez.

Captain America 3 brought together almost every character who had been introduced to the MCU up to that point, except Thor and Hulk.

So I think they're extraordinarily flexible in terms of how and when to team up different characters.

Personally, I thought the Silver Surfer in FFII: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) was one of the best parts of the movie.
The special effects were good and the Surfer appeared as I'd always imagined he would in real life.

No, I'm not in favor of gender / race / orientation / or religion swapping of any ESTABLSHED major characters.

Let me make a caveat - I was the first one to buy a comic that showed that the main characters had all undergone a sex change (or some other alteration; like they'd all turned into gorillas)... I wanted to find out why and what was going on, and engage in the novelty of seeing popular characters drawn differently. But comics are different from movies - comics usually come out monthly and can continue for decades, thus it's difficult to keep coming up with new ideas & stories, where as movies may be someone's first or only introduction to iconic characters. So, as long as some silly change wasn't permanent in comics, then it was usually welcome as the latest gimmick to sell the book.

But with movies? Look, if the characters are so lacking that you need to radically change their most fundamental & basic aspects, then maybe find a different story to tell. But if characters are known and beloved by millions to the point where they've been around for decades and warrant movies made about them, then that popularity SHOULD mean they don't need to be changed in ways that would alter who they are, their origin, their relationships and their stories.

By this point, practically any comic book character making it into the movies for the first time is pretty much completely unknown to the general moviegoer who hasn't read any comics.

Right. So, wouldn't it make sense to present a definitive version of classic characters rather than some alternate, altered version that does not represent what & who the characters have always been?

And definitive doesn't always mean original. Take Batman, for instance. In his first couple appearances he carried a gun and killed criminals. These very stories led to a definitive version where he despised guns (since that was the weapon used to kill his parents) - this aspect, derived from his evolution, became a definitive part of his mythos (which is why I didn't like seeing Batman utilizing firearms as part of his vehicles in various movies).

Imho, it wouldn't.

I like that the characters are receiving new iterations with new audiences in mind. I think that's totally the way to go.

Okay.

I just think that creators and their creations deserve a degree of respect and that new generations deserve to learn about classics before they are introduced to other's takes on or alterations of classics.

Is it better to see Duchamp's Mona Lisa where he put a mustache on her and be told that
"this is Leonardo DaVinci's Mona Lisa." (To which the first and obvious question would be "why does she have a mustache?") Or would it be better to learn what the original looks like, see what its creator intended, and then learn about Duchamp's defacement? (Rather than going through life believing DaVinci painted a mustache on the woman?)