Twentieth Century Fox officially has director Josh Trank's Fantastic Four reboot scheduled to be released on March 16, 2015, but at this stage it's hard to imagine that the production will be able to make that date. In order to have the proper amount of post-production time to finish the movie, one would assume that they would have to start rolling cameras almost immediately. That doesn't seem to be happening, and instead the studio has hired a new writer to possibly do a complete overhaul of the project's current script. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox has has hired screenwriter Simon Kinberg to pen a new draft of the superhero movie.
Kinberg has a considerable amount of experience working on comic book adaptations at Fox. In 2006 he wrote the script for Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand, and then in 2011 he served as both a writer and a producer on Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class. His next credit will be Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past. Outside of the X-Men series he also wrote the screenplay for McG's This Means War, Doug Liman's Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi thriller from the summer Elysium.
This is the second time this year that we've heard about a new writer being brought aboard Fantastic Four, as all the way back in February it was reported that Dark Shadows' Seth Grahame-Smith had been brought aboard to work on writer Jeremy Slater's initial draft. THR says that Michael Green (Smallville, Heroes) and T.S. Nowlin (the upcoming Maze Runner adaptation) were also brought on at one point as well, but that the situation with Kinberg may be different than the others. According to the trade's sources, the new writer "may be overhauling the script substantially." Considering that we know absolutely nothing about the version they are currently working on it's impossible to say what will be getting changed.
In July it had been reported that the Fantastic Four reboot was planning to start production in Louisiana in September - following the end of principal photography on X-Men: Days of Future Past - but obviously that didn't happen. At this point its hard to tell if Fox just wants to make sure that they have the best possible movie in the works or if things are just a mess behind the scenes. Trank has been officially attached to the project since last summer, and it definitely seems like he's sticking with the gig. We just may not actually get to see the finished result until much later than we were originally told.
