Max Landis Shares His Cool FANTASTIC FOUR Ideas

If you don’t know the name Max Landis then don’t be alarmed. He’s the kid of John Landis, Hollywood legend, and his best known work is undoubtedly the 2012 found-footage superhero movie Chronicle. It rocked, and it’s what landed Josh Trank Fantastic Four. He has a dozen other projects in development, but what many don’t know is the guy is a fan fiction writer. Yup, you heard me.

Landis frequently writes treatments and scripts for popular upcoming movies and then talks openly about them online; sometimes he pitches them to the studio and they don’t work out, but others are just things he comes up with in his spare time. They’re mostly all collected over at Max Landis Writes (although I’m not sure if he has anything to do with it) which has a ton of fan treatments on display: Ghostbusters 3, Super Mario – The Movie and even a Spider-Man musical. His Twitter feed is also a treasure trove of information and goodies which is what we’re gonna focus on today.

From these few tweets, it seems as if Landis isn’t a fan of the direction that this new Fantastic Four movie went either, even though he and Trank worked together on Chronicle (in case you hadn’t guessed from the opening lines of this article). In fact, he’s even drawn up some thoughts on where he would have taken it. Sadly it’s nothing concrete, just a few ideas, but they’re intriguing.

IIRC in my pitch for FF, the ship they went up on was called “The Fantastic.” So the news media ultimately called them “The Fantastic Four.

— Max Landis (@Uptomyknees) August 4, 2015

It was an illegal space launch for an Elon Musk type figure,and Reed’s dorky ass named the ship.

— Max Landis (@Uptomyknees) August 4, 2015

My movie was primarily a fun heartfelt comedy about science and friendship, so it doesn’t surprise me they went in a different direction.

— Max Landis (@Uptomyknees) August 4, 2015

Like I said, it’s nothing grand, but it was enough to get me thinking. Calling the ship ‘The Fantastic’ is something that Reed would totally do – especially if it was a young Reed like Fox ended up going for. There are a lot of cheesy elements to the team (Victor von Doom/Doctor Doom is the main one that springs to mind) so it’s hard to actually try and adapt it with a serious tone. By making it comedic you can embrace the sillier aspects like the names and get a few good laughs out of the reasoning. Unfortunately, this reboot didn’t go down that route, and judging by the Rotten Tomatoes score it seems to have paid the price. It’s a shame, because it could have worked and we’re probably now not getting another Fantastic Four film for a long, long time.

At the end of the day, there are a million different ways this reboot could have gone. Perhaps in an alternate reality we’ll all be heading to the theaters this weekend to see the Max Landis-written version. Ah, well. It’s a nice “What if?”