Since director Josh Trank and his cast of rising, young talent finished principal photography on the Fantastic Four reboot, we haven’t seen much beyond two trailers. Fans have already overanalyzed this move as a sign of a poor final product. It’s not their fault. They’ve been burned before... twice! But Simon Kinberg, who produced and worked on the screenplay for the film, assures us that there’s a better reason why the team has been keeping its secrets close to the vest.
During an interview with HitFix, Kinberg explained that he, Trank and Fox want to showcase the best possible product, which explains the lack of footage at last year’s Comic-Con and the delayed teaser trailer release.
We really just don't want to show anything until it's ready, until it looks great, and they show the real intention of the shot or the movie. Then we'll show it. That's why we've held on to so much. We held on to the Thing. We held on to Doom. We held on until we were further along.
It’s apparent from the Fantastic Four trailers that a lot of visual effects work is going into this film. For one, Jamie Bell’s transformation into The Thing was done through motion capture, as opposed to the rubbery suit Michael Chiklis wore in the 2005 version and its sequel. Though, all the main cast members undergo extensive VFX-enhanced transformations. Kimberg specifically noted Reed Richards (Miles Teller), aka Mr. Fantastic, given the recent confusion over the description of his powers on the official website. He called the character’s stretching abilities as one of "the harder visual effects to render in a way that feels real and visceral and physical." Make no mistake, though. He will be stretching.
?Tim Story’s rendition of Marvel’s first family didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the property’s fan base, but everything we’ve seen so far from Trank’s vision has been mind-blowing. The filmmaker caught Hollywood’s attention with his dark and gritty superheroes-meet-found-footage film, Chronicle, and studios, such as Lucasfilm and Fox, are wanting to latch onto his unique sensibilities. For Fantastic Four, he’s taking a drastic departure from the team’s classical origin story. Instead of becoming exposed to cosmic radiation in space, Reed Richards (Teller), Sue Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) and Victor Domashev (Tobey Kebbell) travel to an alternate dimension that alters their physical forms.
Fantastic Four opens in theaters on August 7.
