We’re still anxiously awaiting the first footage from 20th Century Fox and Josh Trank’s reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise. The first trailer for the film is expected to be attached to Kingsman: The Secret Service when it opens next month, so there’s still a bit of a wait ahead of us. But in the meantime, Collider scored a pair of official behind the scenes images, which you can check out below.
On the left is Michael B. Jordan, along with screenwriter Simon Kinberg, and that’s Trank on the right. Jordan, who portrays Johnny Storm (aka The Human Torch) in the film, appears to be wearing his character’s costume. It’s definitely not the sort of look we expected, but with absolutely zero context, it’s hard to pass any sort of judgment. No word yet on whether or not the film will employ any CG enhancement for the costumes, but that seems pretty likely.
Collider spoke at length to Kinberg and Trank, who confirmed that the lack of marketing and promotion for the film was by design, and not because there are problems with the film:
“I think a lot of that stuff is stemming from the fact that we’ve consciously decided to not release anything official. This isn’t like The Avengers. Even when the first Avengers came out, there were four other movies that people were familiar with. The suits and the tone and the look and the feel. So they could release those things or drop them on Twitter. With Simon on the X-Men movies, there were other movies that came before the last X-Men movie so Bryan [Singer] could feel more confident in tweeting teases of what’s to come.
But this movie, we really want the audience to have the proper reaction to this material seeing it for the first time. You’ve really got to put your best foot forward. You can’t just leak an image to strike up a conversation. You want people to see something that has thought behind it. And the teaser should do just that. With conversations online, you can’t really control it. In this day and age people have come to expect that artists are going to give everybody information on Twitter about what they’re doing, but not every artist is like that. I’m not really like that. If I was painting a picture I wouldn’t want to take a picture of a single paint stroke. I’d rather show people what it looks like when it’s done.”
Fantastic Four will hit theaters on August 7. The additional cast includes Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell and Toby Kebbell.
fantastic four josh trank michael b. jordan simon kinberg