TheRetroCritic

Though it's often forgotten, there was an early attempt at making a film about The Fantastic Four back in 1994 when German producer Bernd Eichinger teamed up with B-movie maestro Roger Corman to make a low-budget film based on the iconic Marvel characters. The film cost about $1M and was never released though it would later resurface on bootleg videos. Stan Lee was not directly involved with the project except for selling the rights temporarily but it still stayed surprisingly true to the comics both in spirit and story-wise which shows that there definitely was a genuine attempt at making the most of that low-budget. The film sees scientist Reed Richards (Alex Hyde-White) gather a team to perform an experiment in space, an experiment which, of course, goes wrong and they crash-land back on Earth unharmed thanks to unusual powers they somehow picked up along the way. An ex-colleague of Richards', Victor Von Doom (an over-the-top Joseph Culp), lives up to his last name and

Thinking about it, 2005 was a pivotal year for comic book movies. The first Fantastic Four movie was released after the first wave of modern superhero films reached its peak with the likes of superior sequels Spider-Man 2 and X-Men 2 , the same year that the gritty Batman Begins came out to reclaim the Dark Knight's validity and just before further dire sequels pretty much killed those franchises until Iron Man several years later. It should have been no surprise, then, that the film was both very much a product of that first wave in spirit and yet also the start of the subgenre's decline quality-wise. The Fantastic Four were always a lighter, more colourful bunch so making a live-action version of the comics would require some pretty high-end special effects to pull off the characters' unusual abilities and a script sharp enough to not let the film devolve into farce. With no Roger Corman in charge this time and an audience who accepted Spider-Man as a legitimat