Movie Studios are learning the wrong lessons from comic books

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The 2015 summer movie season is coming to a sour end. Overall, the industry did okay: not record breaking, but not terrible. Jurassic World, Furious 7, and Avengers: Age of Ultron all released this summer, and all three currently reside in the top 10 grossing films of all time. Hard to complain.

And yet, so dismal is the latest salvo in the superhero genre that it has thrown a wet blanket over the entire situation that is Hollywood summer cinema. That Fantastic Four is a dismal mess is by now well known. So bad is this move that piling on brings no pleasure. Fox and Josh Trank knew what they had, a $100 million dollar ($200 M if you add marketing to the production budget) failure. To no one’s surprise, it failed.

The hopes for Fantastic Four were high, for the studio and Trank. Fox had visions of a new successful franchise. One that would live on to see its own sequels and cross-over into Fox’s other superhero titles, including the X-Men movie universe (the next of which is 2016’s Deadpool). Trank, meanwhile, was looking to build his sci-fi reputation, which he kicked off with the very good Chronicle, by inserting a cool genre film into the world of oversized superhero movies.

But surely, the resulting film and box-office failure of Fantastic Four will alter Fox’s plan. This is the third, and biggest, flop that Fox has made with these characters (2005, Fantastic Four and 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). At some point, Fox has to realize that Marvel’s original comic book superhero team just isn’t a good fit for the big-screen, right?

Wrong.

After Fantastic Four opened to an embarrassing $26 Million dollars in the United States, Fox domestic distribution chief Chris Aronson told the Hollywood Reporter: “We remain committed to these characters and we have a lot to look forward to in our Marvel universe.” Yes. That means that plans for a sequel remain in motion.

So we have not seen the last of the Fantastic Four on the big-screen. Trank’s movie is the fourth live-action adaptation of the characters (Roger Corman produced one in the 1990s that was never released. It’s on Youtube, and tremendously bad) who seem so natural in the comic books and so unfit for the screen.

I wish we could say that Fox, by pursuing yet another FF film that no one is asking for, was making a bad business decision, that throwing good money after bad movies was a sign that they were missing the message. But that’s not the case. Not anymore.

Fox is following a tried-and-true industry model that has worked for the past 50 years. That industry is just not the movies, it’s comics.

The superhero comic book industry has been doing for half a century what the movie business has been doing for about 15 years: committing to characters. Characters are what have sold comic books ever since the inception of the superhero. Readers have favorite writers, of course, or artists. But the model has always remained the same. If a book is failing, fire the creative team and start over. Repeat. Forever if necessary.

This is why Marvel pitted such a vociferous fight against allowing creators ownership of their creations. Marvel must own everything involved in their massive universe. If an individual owned a character, then that character might be lost, and with it any future profits on toys, cross-overs, and adaptations.

Once you have a character, you must commit. It’s what Fox said immediately after the latest iteration of FF bombed. “We’re still committed to these characters.” What you make is not the point; what matters is the names on the poster.

Being a creative person in superhero comic tends to be a never ending battle pitting artists against the business case. That’s not an overstatement. The Untold History of Marvel Comics, by Sean Howe, is essentially a 300 page review of who worked for Marvel, when, and why they left. In most cases artists left because they were fired, or fed up with the company due to a lack of acknowledgement (Marvel owned everything anyone ever created without paying royalties or giving artists’ rights) or a loss of creative control over characters and stories.

The poor treatment of creators in the big two comics publishers-where superheroes have always dominated-is a long documented problem. It starts at the very origin of Marvel Comics in the 1960s, with Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, co-creators of so many of Marvel’s most famous titles (including FF). Lee, the writer and showman, has worked with Marvel ever since. But Kirby, the artist perhaps most responsible for the visual style of superhero comics, left the company in a public break over ownership and artist representation. Kirby would would fight with Marvel for years, in public and in court, to get the ownership of his work. A fight that in his lifetime, he never won.

That fight has been on repeat ever since. Arists and writers come and go. Some stick longer than others (Chris Claremont on X-Men) but that just makes their departure even more jarring (Chris Claremont on X-Men). They can succeed or fail but they are never necessary. The Marvel Universe is about superheroes. It is not about creators. And now that the Marvel Universe is on the big-screen, the model seems to have followed.

Maybe this is not news. Spider-Man is getting his third reboot in 15 years. Green Lantern will appear again in DC’s movie universe, despite the disaster that was Green Lantern. When X-Men Origins: Wolverine turned out terrible, it took Fox only four years to forget that ever happened and make The Wolverine. And that wasn’t even a reboot. It was just a mostly unrelated Wolverine movie that starred the same character.

Now Fantastic Four has been rebooted after failure, only to produce another failure, only to get a re-commitment from the studio. What can we take from this history other than the lesson that failure doesn’t matter. Not really. Not to the studio. Only characters matter.

Superheroes, comic book adaptations, and genre series are the heart of the movie business. Finding a successful action franchise is a quest that every studio is tasked with, and the fear of missing out on the next big film property paralyzes creativity.

This year, creators have come out of superhero projects and talk like they’ve just left a meat-grinder. Joss Whedon made two Avengers films for Marvel, grossing $1.5 and 1.39 Billion respectively. Two of the most successful films of all time and both were critical successes. They are, for many, the benchmark of the superhero movie industry. When Whedon finished making Avengers: Age of Ultron, he had this to say about the process:

Well, I have been to the other side of the mountain. I gotta say, it’s been dark. It’s been weird. It’s been horrible. About a month and a half ago, I said goodbye to my kids, and I’ve been living in Burbank next to the studio. I feel every day like, I didn’t do enough, I didn’t do enough, I didn’t do enough. I wasn’t ready. Here’s failure. Here’s failure. Here’s compromise. Here’s compromise.

This is what it’s like to make a very good superhero movie, for an experienced director. Is it any wonder that Josh Trank, on his second project, struggled with Fantastic Four?

Trank’s behavior may have been part of the problem. That tweet he sent the night before the movie opened was a stupid move no matter what. But the message that should be taken away from the Fantastic Four debacle is not that Trank is insufferable. It’s that, once again, a superhero comic book adaptation has gone into development, produced a failure, and left another artist flailing.

Add to this that Marvel removed Edgar Wright from Ant-Man, after he spent years on the project, because of supposed creative differences, and it’s clear that the business of movies is ever-more resembling the business of comics. Its characters, not creators, that matter.

If Fox makes Fanstastic Four 2, we can safely say this is now true in Hollywood: making movies that are worth watching is less of a priority than making movies that have the right characters. It means that green-light decisions at Fox are made based on whether the words “fantastic” and “four” will appear in the title of a movie.

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One Time in Comics: Ben Grimm (the Thing) protects a mother’s right to her child

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Yesterday, the world got it’s first look at the Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, for Josh Trank’s upcoming Fantastic Four movie. One thing about The Thing is that he always kind of looks the same. He is a human man who, by the power of a cosmic ray storm, turned to orange rock. What’s interesting about The Thing is not his appearance as much as what’s going on underneath that orange rock skin.

With Grimm, it turns out, there’s a lot going on in there.

The Thing first appeared in Fantastic Four #1, in 1961. He bounced around FF and other books for two decades, before he got his own eponymous book, in 1983. The first run of The Thing was written by John Byrne, whose introspective and poetic narration makes him the perfect writer for a character like Ben Grimm. Byrne’s ability to turn the outward monsters inward with depth and beauty marks his work and makes him one of my all time favorite comics writers (see also Byrne’s time on The Incredible Hulk, Sensational She-Hulk).

The first issues of The Thing highlight the beginnings of Ben Grimm’s life. Issue 1 has him re-visiting the haunts of his youth. He grew up on the lower-east side of New York, on Yancy Street. He was in the local gang and saw his brother stabbed to death by local rivals. He was a poor Jewish kid, eventually orphaned. Issue 2 tells the story of Ben’s first love, and her turning him away for the sake of her career (that story’s subtext might be about an abortion, actually. A question for another time).

It was John Byrne, then who wrote The Thing #3, which tells of Crystal the Inhuman seeking the help of Ben Grimm in protecting her child from her own husband, Quicksilver. These are the kind of stories that define Ben Grimm. He is a Frankenstein-a monster on the outside (unlike the other members of FF he cannot change his appearance), but on the inside he is a compassionate and tender man.

Here’s how he ends up protecting a mother and daughter’s right to self-determination.

Grimm is at the hospital visiting his girlfriend Alicia when Crystal and her giant teleporting Dog-like friend Lockjaw enter the scene. She is desperate and afraid and knows nowhere else to turn.

Ben is gentle, a stone man made of compassion and kindness for the people he loves, and embraces her, and carries her, and hears her story.

I love this panel. Such strange balance and shape with Lockjaw and Ben. Crystal in the center of two beasts who love her and will do anything to help her recover her child.

She is an inhuman and her husband, Quicksilver is a human mutant. They have had a daughter, Luna, and she is without powers-she is just a human girl. This is unacceptable to Quicksilver, who plans to subject Luna to the mists that provide inhumans with their powers. As the father of Luna, this decision resides solely with Quicksilver. Crystal opposes this. She wants her child to live as she was born rather than be subjected to the unknown effects of the ‘terrain mists.’

She will not risk her child’s life. But her husband does not care .

So Ben travels to the center of the earth’s moon (where the inhumans live) in an attempt to protect Luna from her father. He meets the inhumans, allies of the Fantastic Four but not accepting of Ben’s plan to interfere with their traditions.

Medusa, the only woman among them and Crystal’s sister, is moved by Ben’s attempt to protect Crystal choice. But she can do nothing. “As the father, it’s his choice,” Gorgon tells Ben and Medusa, “not hers.”

Medusa doesn’t stop what’s happening. But her turmoil is clear. Byrne adds that linguistic flourish of his, as Black Bolt touches her “as gentle as soft rain upon her shoulder.” But she leaves, upset. Byrne ends the scene with a powerful statement of tradition in flux. “Something important seems to have died here.”

Eventually, Ben Grimm confronts Quicksilver. The two men discuss the right of the father to determine the fate of his daughter, and do not come to terms.

Crystal returns, determined to save her child from a father unwilling to listen to his wife.

But still Quicksilver refuses to quit.

He claims again that it is his right to determine the fate of his child. That tradition makes it so. Not Crystal, nor Ben Grimm, nor any other human or inhuman as the right to take that tradition from him.

He claims that “anything would be preferable” to a human, powerless, girl. It is right, under “inhuman law” to determine his child’s future.

In the end, it’s Lockjaw, the transporting Dog-like inhuman who saves the day. He reveals that he is what he is because of the terrain mists that Quicksilver wants to subject his daughter to. Looking around the room, Ben Grimm sees a fish-man, a dog-creature, and a number of other inhumans. He sees in Luna a child “who has a chance fer something that’s been taken from” Ben Grimm.

Nobody has the right, Grimm says, to take away Luna’s chance to be a human. He lost his own, and he knows the cost of losing one’s capacity to choose a life for yourself. Tradition be damned.

Ben Grimm, you’re a good man.

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Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four looks like a sci-fi movie about people

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I have beat up on the upcoming Fantastic Four movie for the past year, and I’m not alone. This happens mostly because everything coming/leaking out about the film leads us to believe that the film will be…problematic.

But such talk is, really, all just talk. It goes only so far and ends when we start to see actual footage from the film. The property has never successfully been adapted for the the big screen (you might remember-but probably not-the terrible FF that was released in 2005, or its equally terrible sequel: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The failure of that franchise did free up Chris Evans to join Marvel’s team as Captain America, so yeah failure). As for Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four? The truth is that we don’t know much about it.

All we really know about Fantastic Four is a group of very talented folks-Josh Trank’s Chronicle is one of the best superhero movies of the new millennium; add Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller and Kate Mara, and you really could do worse-have come together to give this sci-fi super-family comic-book one more shot.

We’ve had our fun. But now, we have a trailer and can start to ask ourselves what we should expect from Fantastic Four. So. What should we expect from Fantastic Four upon its release in August? I’ve watched the teaser trailer, released this week, a time or two, and I can say this: I’m not sure. But I think it’s safe to say the trailer gives us more room for optimism than any thing previously officially or unofficially said, announced, leaked, or snarked about Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four.

What do you think? Are you optimistic about this year’s FF?

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