"Fantastic Four:" AICN throws down the gauntlet 

"Fantastic Four:" AICN throws down the gauntlet

Those of you in the Los Angeles area may have heard the faint hissing sound wafting over the Film District early this morning and wondered "what the hell was that?" Wonder no longer: The sound you hear is a few thousand executives, producers and business types at 20th Century Fox and Marvel Films sucking their breath through pursed lips as their personal web-watchers informed them that "Aint-It-Cool-News" honcho Harry Knowles announced that he was, well, "perturbed" at the direction of the "Fantastic Four" movie adaptation.

Welcome back, for those enjoying the weeks of relative normalcy in the world of web journalism, to the warped reality that this "business" is: Variety could print a front-page story tommorow about "bad-buzz" around a big-budget tentpole like this and the studio would largely shrug it off, but a "fanboy" guru in Austin drops a "fan's perspective" column that essentially states that he is dismayed by gossip he's reading and it counts as a BIG problem for the project. Make no mistake, having Knowles come out this hard negative on a project of this pedigree THIS early in production is a potentially seismic event for the producers.

Here's Harry's peice:
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=17541

And, for completeness' sake, here's the IGN.com article that inspired him:
http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/513/513316p1.html?fromint=1

Okay, my fellow Geeks reading this understand why we're talking "big deal" here, so permit me to address the non-geeky for a moment and explain what's going on as briefly as possible in semi-timeline order-of-events fashion:

1.)Fox and Marvel are making a film out of Marvel's comic franchise, "The Fantastic Four."

2.)Fans are excited by the prospects because this is one of comicdoms most enduring franchises.

3.)The Studio is "unsure" about how to proceed because, while enduring, FF has never QUITE attained the cultural-iconhood in the "mainstream" of a "Superman," "Spider-Man" or even "X-Men."

4.)Rumors hit early last year, courtesy some off-the-cuff vaugaries by Marvel Films producer Avi Arad, that the film would be aiming for a "sitcom"-like, family-comedy angle.

5.)If there's one thing you NEVER say to comic fans about an action franchise, it's that you're either going "family" or "comedy" with the property. Negative buzz has been an undercurrent since then.

6.)Shortly after the "movie-is-a-sitcom" buzz started, A mini-shakeup occured at Marvel Comics proper: Plans were announced to unnexpectedly remove series-writer Mark Waid in the middle of a much-praised run and replace him with a new artist/writer team charged to turn in a new direction that would stress, yup: family-comedy as an angle.

7.)Fans, believing this to be A.) a bad idea as Waid's run had been quite popular and B.) an obvious attempt to make the comic "conform" to the proposed vision of the movie as a tie-in, revolted in a massive letter-writing protest that resulted in Waid being restored and the "new" team's concept being spun off into it's own seperate book. All was calm until...

8.) Marvel officially announced it was adding an "Fantastic Four" title to it's "Ultimate" product line. For the uninitiated: "Ultimate Marvel" is a line of comics, seperate from the main-continuity books, which re-tell the stories of popular characters in a "modern setting, unhampered by lengthy backstory." That's company speak for: "Same stuff, but with old-in-a-week MTV-references in the dialogue to seem more current." Ultimate Marvel basically serves a sole purpose: To provide Marvel with "easy access" versions of characters soon to be made into films.

9.) This came to a head yesterday when IGN published the story where Arad eludes HEAVILY to the idea that the FF movie is sloping MUCH more toward the "Ultimate" than "Classic" model. Cue uh-oh sound here.

10.) Knowles, who had been (for AICN) mostly-silent on this particular issue, issued the scathing column linkable above. Fallout is, at this point, innevitable.

Here's why this is a big deal and BIG bad news for Marvel and Fox:

Right now, the only people who are following the production of this film, the only "journalists" who will be keeping track of the early stages of this project, the ONLY group of potential filmgoers paying attention at this stage... are now going to be OUT FOR THEIR HEADS.

Now, Knowles, on his own, doesn't really have the clout to "torpedo" the project with this. HOWEVER, AICN's true power and true threat to the studios in cases like this are it's "talkbacks" on such articles: The endless message-boards on which Geeks respond to the story, often with links to other sites and thus the news and the negative buzz spreads.

Marvel needs "The Geek Street" to be psyched about it's projects from the get-go, because a super-excited fan-base with web access translates into BILLIONS in free-promotion for the film months before they even cut the trailers. Not only that, they need even more for them NOT to be outwardly hostile, because it so happens that fans who are willing to devote time and web-space to expressing their joy at an upcoming project are ALSO willing to devote DOUBLE the time and web-space to expression their apprehension. Check out the coverage for Warners "Catwoman" debacle for proof of this phenomenon.

What Knowles has done, with this posting (in bold, bright-blue hypertext link at the top of his high-traffic site) is to turn the buzz on FF from bad-to-worse. Those Marvel and Fox most need to be "hyped" about this are now unhappy, and it will translate into a storm of negative anti-hype for a good while.

My take: I like Harry and AICN half the time and am "apprehensive" about them for an equal half for the same reason; it's the only site among the "movie gossip boom" brood that still maintains it's guerilla modus-operandi. This is the sort of business that made Harry the most unlikely X-factor in film production history, and in this case he's close to 100% correct as far as I'm concerned: This isn't the "costume issue" from the X-Men movies or the "biological webshooters" mini-mess from Spider-Man, this is a bad direction at a pure story and character level.

We're about to witness a lot of interesting news from this over the next few days, and it's going get MORE interesting before it gets better. Knowles, knowingly or unknowingly (unknowingly being VERY unlikely,) has symbolically laid out about a dozen cannonballs in front of Movie Geekdom en-masse and pointed right in the direction of Fox/Marvel, and for good or for ill their publicity department is about to have a VERY busy rest of the week.