If you think the Fantastic Four fiasco was over and done with, you are wrong. Even now, as the latest superhero film from Fox recedes into the shadows of low box office numbers and forgotten memories, new details about what we could have received are coming to light. On top of the Thing-centric action sequence and Fantasti-car, we also could have seen Doom’s castle on Planet Zero.
Steve Jung is a concept artist who worked on such films as Terminator: Genisys, Thor and Tron: Legacy. He also just so happened to be enlisted early on to draft designs for Fantastic Four. Jung posted four pieces of concept art to Facebook. As he wrote, his involvement occurred before all the drama. None of his work actually made it into the movie, either, because he said it was changed so many times after he departed the project.
In addition to designing the landscape of Planet Zero, he also conceived a concept for Dr. Doom’s castle. As we see in the movie, Toby Kebbell’s Victor travels to this alternate dimension with Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), while Sue Storm (Kate Mara) stays behind. After touching a throbbing patch of green energy, the ground erupts, forcing the quartet to flee back to their transporter. While Reed, Johnny, Ben and (on the other end) Sue are transformed by this occurrence, Victor is left behind and thought to be dead. However, he too is transformed and kept alive by the planet.
He spends more than a year living in this dimension, and, at one point or another, it seems that we could’ve have seen him living in his own castle of Doom. The concept art Jung posted not only shows the exterior, which is similar to various comic book portrays of Doom’s castle in Latveria, but also the inside. Jung’s designs reveal the Fantastic Four walking through the archways of this site. Jung wrote that Planet Zero’s charred terrain is inspired by a photo of director Josh Trank’s ashtray.
The presence of Doom’s castle further reiterates that the character was meant to have a much larger role in the film than what we got. The theatrical cut only showed his villainy emerge at the tail end, while there were many other details that were originally meant to be included. Kebbell, for one, told Collider way back when that his character’s name was Victor Domashev, an "anti-social programmer" who goes by "Doom" on blogging sites. That, obviously, didn’t make it into the final version. Furthermore, there are scenes in the original trailers that were cut, including a conversation between Reed and Victor after he was discovered alive on Planet Zero. Other details cut were the Fantasti-car, an attack by The Thing on a Chechen terrorist base, and a larger presence of Latveria, Doom’s fictional home country in the comics. How many other things were cut from this final movie?
