Writer Jeremy Slater recently spoke with ScreenCrush about the recently failed Fantastic Four movie, and what went wrong. Slater wrote the original drafts of the script for the film… Slater said he wrote “10-15 drafts over a six month period” for the film before other writers took over, and described his script as featuring “lots of humor, lots of heart, lots of spectacle.”
Slater said that the script began much like the film did, with Reed and Ben as children. When Reed arrives at the Baxter Building, his script envisioned the place as “a sort of Hogwarts for nerds: a school filled with young geniuses zipping around on prototype hoverboards and experimenting with anti-gravity and teleportation and artificial lifeforms.”
His script featured a battle with Annihilus which was described by Slater as “a pissed-off cybernetic T-Rex”, and that would encounter would have given the team its powers, and left Victor for dead. Slater added, “In addition to Annihilus and the Negative Zone, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilized world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60-foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet. We had monsters and aliens and Fantasticars and a cute spherical H.E.R.B.I.E. robot that was basically BB-8 two years before BB-8 ever existed. And if you think all of that sounds great… well, yeah, we did, too. The problem was, it would have also been massively, MASSIVELY expensive.”
The final film only contained one line of Slater’s dialogue: “Don’t blow up.”