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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
The idea that putting characters in an unfamiliar environment would somehow make the writers incapable of introducing and managing those characters is a weird thing to say - especially given that the former is an aspect of the plot, and the latter is an aspect of characterization, and the entire point of plot is to provide a venue through which the characters can be developed.
Here's what a hypothetical 60's-FF-are-displaced-in-time-and/or-lost-in-space film would need to do.
First, establish who Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben were before they go on their eventful mission. Not just who they are individually and how they relate to each other, but what sort of lives they were living on 1960's Earth before everything changed.
Second, establish the wonky science stuff that transports/transforms them and kicks off the plot.
Third, have them discover, learn to use, and come to terms with the powers they gain. And since each of them is given a different power, each of them is going to have to go through a different learning process from the others.
Fourth, have them learn about and come to terms with the new world they've found themselves. This would be an especially big task in the lost-in-space scenario, as the audience would also need lots of exposition about where they've wound up. But even in the time displaced version, there's still a lot you'd be expected to do with the FF adjusting to the present.
And fifth, after all that other stuff's been taken care of, find time for the Four to come together as a team and beat up a bad guy.
My concern is that completing those first four steps would take up so much of the movie's screentime, the film would be almost over before we actually got to see the Fantastic Four as a team doing superhero stuff.
Having an ensemble cast of characters (a true ensemble, not a lead hero and some prominent supporting characters) can already make it difficult to find time for everyone to have enough development and get their own moments to shine. Having an ensemble cast when you're trying to do a gaining-new-powers origin-story, a stranded-in-a-strange-new-world story, and a heroes-foil-bad-guy's-scheme-with-lots-of-punching-and-explosions story? Doing two of those three is feasible, in the hands of a skilled screenwriter, but I think doing all of them in a roughly two-hour runtime is asking too much.
You make it sound much harder than it actually is. All of those can either get a lot of focus and screentime or be breezed past in a 5-minute scene each. You can also combine them, make learning about their powers happen while they're learning about the new environment, have the villain be set up though worldbuilding in their new environment. These are not particularly difficult things to do.
Aside from making it sound harder than it actually is there's a lot of them that aren't strictly speaking necessary. Coming to terms with their new world for one is something that depends on what the new world actually is. If they're stuck in some kind of space-time no man's land of hostile forces in deep space, there's nothing much to establish aside from "they're in a no man's land where all manner of odd cosmic events and creatures abound and the only safe space is their mothership". In fact this approach is actually better as you basically strip them down to only one another and put their family dynamics front and center. You don't actually even need to establish vast cosmic societies or anything. Hell, Guardians of the Galaxy is set on the far reaches of space and it gets by on a sort of roadtrip approach where they go through several planetary setpieces without really establishing any of them thoroughly aside from Xandar (kind of).
In my head, I picture a movie that starts with the ball rolling with The Four already stranded in deep space, powered up and we see their histories and struggles through their interactions with themselves in this isolated corner of the cosmos they find themselves in.
If you want a crash course on who they are you can even have the movie start with a kooky, 60's-style in-universe educational video about the ill-fated mission of the Fantastic Four, which would itself be a highly amusing way to welcome the audience in this idea while not wasting time and keeping them up to speed. You can even have the characters themselves be watching this movie and commenting on it, to already establish the point they were and are now. Have The Thing sorrowfully rewind the video and pause on an image of him when he was a human and the like.
In general I think you (and a lot of people) just overestimate how crucial it is to do traditional origin stories. It's not that hard to do stories where the ball is already on the field from the word go and you learn more about the game as it goes along.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."The original Fantastic Four comic got through the origin in a couple pages so it could spend the rest on Mole Man.
We should learn from the Fantastic Four comic.
Forever liveblogging the AvengersFirst, establish who Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben were before they go on their eventful mission. Not just who they are individually and how they relate to each other, but what sort of lives they were living on 1960's Earth before everything changed.
Right off the bat, no it wouldn't.
Lots of adventure stories begin In Medias Res, in particular just beginning with the characters' departure (or even well after it) rather than having to sift through backstory. Heck, the only reason Guardians of the Galaxy has one is because the writers chose to have "pining for his mother" a primary character trait of Quill's. And even that was extremely short.
Stories don't have to fully establish characters first and then begin the plot. They can also develop characters during the course of the narrative.
Technobabble is not particularly difficult, especially on subjects the audience is already familiar with.
Hell, I can't even remember how long it took Ant-Man to explain how Pym particles work. There was a brief training montage, but "these are Pym Particles, they make things shrink" were mostly just inferred through brief lines of dialgue. And I don't think Star Wars has ever explained hyperspace.
Spaceships are especially easy because the audience knows what spacechips are already. The audience only really needs to be established on "it's a spaceship, it flies through space."
These in tandem would actually be what the plot would be about in this sort of situation, so they would more realistically be steps 1 and 2. It's important to remember, also, that different parts of the plot can be established and developed together and during the same moments, rather than each individually taking separate chunks of a film.
If we meet them In Medias Res, then the "learning to deal with their powers" would be part of the rising action, most likely, and of course the planet would be the whole of the narrative. Similar somewhat to how the first X-Men movie handled it.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 27th 2020 at 10:54:24 AM
I'd have the movie start from the POV of some hostile would-be galactic conqueror whose forces are in the middle of being routed by some unseen foes. The conqueror immediately panics when it hears one of the foes boasts, one that has gained a reputation throughout the galaxy...
"It's Clobberin' Time!"
Disgusted, but not surprisedMost of those difficulties would be present no matter how you run an origin for the F4. Yeah you have to introduce them. Yeah, you have to empower them. Yeah, you have to establish what they do and where they do it. The Lost in Space/Land of the Lost angle works because it runs you through most of that without having to overexplain most of it.
What I want, personally, is the kind of movie where a claymation creature would feel at home.
Usually the more chararter you have to estalbish, the quicker it need to be, Guardians just embrace tne zaniness and decide any explanation is uneeded, focusing more in their intereaction, which of course bring the next point: what tone would the movie?.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"Also, don't make Doctor Doom the Big Bad. Save that for the sequel. Instead, go for one of the other FF villains like Blastaar or Annihilus.
Disgusted, but not surprisedWe have mentioned Lost in Space a few times, and that's basically it. Idealistic, outlandish Sci-fi adventure with a focus on family and (both geographical, technological and particularly social) exploration. Other examples could be some episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series and the first run of Doctor Who under the First Doctor. The 60's had that wave of sci-fi that thought about different/future worlds influenced by the social movements of that decade and that seems like the tone to be struck here, just adapted to our modern sensibilities (and hopefully, beyond).
@M84: In the "F4 in the 60's period piece", my main take was Red Ghost (AND HIS SUPER-APES!), the Soviet Counterpart to the F4 (Red Ghost having 3 super-apes, both them and him superpowered by the same event that gave the F4 their powers). Hit him with mighty Adaptational Heroism and have the F4 and him come to terms.
Another one I like is our boi Mole-Man for a Voyage to the Center of the Earth approach.
Edited by Gaon on Jul 27th 2020 at 11:35:36 AM
"All you Fascists bound to lose."They could use Grom the Overmind
if they want to tie it to the Eternals.
What would be wrong actually in having the FF be a regular team/family of 21st century scientists who undergo some kind of experiment or other? So, OK, space travel is so last season in the MCU by now, but there are other exploration themes that could be used to initiate the event that empowers them. I don't really see the appeal in absolutely wanting to make them time-displaced or coming from another dimension or whatever.
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.Its just that their whole genre that they belong to is from another time. Their shtick is pulp adventure crossed with nuclear age super science. So why not just have the characters literally be from another time?
There's nothing wrong with making them modern. But its fiction. They can take any approach they want, and I think the time displaced bit would be fun.
Their first movie absolutely should be a super science pulp adventure, though. Either in space or the negative zone or the microverse.
Edited by Zeromaeus on Jul 28th 2020 at 9:02:02 AM
I can definitely see the time-displacement appeal. Yeah, we already had Captain America for that, but I feel like you could play to a different angle with the FF.
With Steve, the main tragedy of his displacement was missing the people he was close to, and his actual adjustment to the changes of society itself was largely limited to how SHIELD/authority had changed, otherwise it was relegated mostly to "ha, he doesn't know what that is because he's from the 40's", and that tapered off around Winter Soldier.
I feel like with the Fantastic Four, you have an opportunity to explore how society itself has changed, primarily with family dynamics and social norms, and you don't have to play the concept as inherently sad because they actually traveled forward with a group of people they care about. It just seems like a neat way to blend the main things that set the FF apart from other super teams... that they're more an adventurer family than a proper superhero team... by having them explore a world that is familiar and yet radically different, and in the process reaffirm that sense of family as they lean on each other to help navigate their new environment.
That was one of my concerns as well. I see the appeal of having a pulp comic era team arriving in the present, but I'm really not sold on Sue's arc being the discovery that she can be somewhere else than in the kitchen. My memories of 60's FF Sue are of her spraining her ankle, getting captured because the baddies could detect heat or she walked on a twig, or turning invisible to sulk because Reed was not paying her enough attention...
Edited by C105 on Jul 28th 2020 at 4:40:25 PM
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.Why not have Sue as the leader?
Reed might be the smartest but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s good at leading people, especially since in the books his leading is often “I don’t have time to explain this to you, just do what I say”
Forever liveblogging the Avengers

That's a fairly easy thing to deal with. The most obvious is if that the F4 mission in the 60's was a colossal disaster (since everyone went missing without a trace and never came back), they simply disbanded and fell out of grace. I don't even see why anyone would feel the need to bring up what (from a earthly perspective) was a bold mission but foolish mission that ended in the presumed deaths of everybody involved.
You could also simply assume that the whole adjacent Baxter Building staff does not exist in their origin as well, and it's only when they return to our current timeline that they establish that whole mechanic.
Or if you want to go wild, the entire Baxter Building structure came to be basically as fanboys of the F4 after their (presumed) deaths in outer space. So when we meet them in the present day they're a closely-knit group of fanboys who are just ecstatic to work with the men they honored since their disappearance.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."