2015 Fantastic Four Writer Didn’t Know His Script Was Scrapped Until He Saw the Movie

For roughly two years, Jeremy Slater was the most confident man in Hollywood. He had co-written what he believed was a genuinely great Fantastic Four script, had a wonderful creative partnership with director Josh Trank, and was actively telling anyone who would listen that they were sitting on something special. “You guys, just wait for Fantastic Four,” he remembered telling people. “We’re the next Christopher Nolan. We’ve got the next Dark Knight trilogy on the way.“

Then he sat down at the screening.

“It wasn’t until I was sitting there in that first audience and realizing, ‘Oh no, something happened here,’” Slater told The Hollywood Reporter. “There was nothing in there that remotely resembled what I had set out to do.”

Slater, whose new film Mortal Kombat II is in theaters now, was remarkably candid about what it’s like to be a writer on a massive studio blockbuster — which is to say, almost completely in the dark. He said he had no idea there was any trouble on set because he simply wasn’t there. The call that effectively ended his involvement came in the form of a familiar Hollywood euphemism. “I got the call that you almost always get on these big blockbuster movies: ‘Hey, we’re going to bring in some fresh eyes,’” he said. “Then the next time you see the movie is when you’re sitting down at the screening three years later.”

He wasn’t even told his script had been thrown out entirely. That part he had to figure out himself, in real time, watching a film that bore no resemblance to the one he thought he’d written.

What Actually Went Wrong With Fantastic Four

The 2015 reboot — starring Miles Teller as Mister Fantastic, Kate Mara as Invisible Woman, Jamie Bell as The Thing, and Michael B. Jordan as Human Torch — was intended to launch a whole new franchise for 20th Century Fox. Instead, it became one of the most notorious misfires in superhero movie history. It earned just $168 million worldwide against a budget that left the studio facing losses somewhere between $80 and $100 million. Its Rotten Tomatoes score sits at a brutal 9%. The Razzie Awards gave it Worst Picture, and Trank picked up Worst Director. The planned sequel was quietly buried.

Slater is careful not to point fingers at Trank — he says his working relationship with the director was genuinely great. But he’s honest about what the experience taught him. “When you’re a writer and you’re playing in other people’s sandboxes, it’s really out of your control,” he said. “You don’t really have any bearing on the quality of the finished product. You just hope that your collaborators all want to make the same movie you wanted to make.”

Miles Teller has been somewhat less diplomatic about the whole thing. “I think it’s unfortunate for that, because so many people worked so hard on that movie and, honestly, maybe there was one really important person who fucked it all up,” he said previously. Teller also recalled the moment he knew things had gone sideways: “When I first saw the movie, I remember talking to one of the studio heads and I was like, ‘I think we’re in trouble.’” He’d taken the role partly out of a practical calculation — “if you want to be taken seriously as a leading man you gotta get on this superhero train” — and this was supposed to be his moment. The casting, he still maintains, was spectacular. Everything else, less so.

The Franchise Gets Another Shot — This Time in the MCU

Of course, Marvel’s First Family has since been handed a proper reset. The Fantastic Four: First Steps brought in an entirely new cast, and they’re already headed into the MCU’s biggest crossover event yet with Avengers: Doomsday, arriving December 18.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays The Thing in the new iteration, recently opened up about what it’s like to navigate a production of that scale — and his experience sounds almost comically different from the controlled chaos of the 2015 film. Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he described Doomsday as more “compartmentalized” than First Steps, where the Fantastic Four cast was present “every day, every day, having a sense of the thing.” On Doomsday, the sheer size of it was a lot to hold in his head. “How it was connecting to other universes, I would have to go back to, like, ‘Joe [Russo] can you just, I know you’ve talked me through, can you just tell me one more time?’”

He also confirmed he never actually saw a complete script. “Those scripts change quite a bit,” he said. “Probably not, it probably didn’t have a full, like, third act. I don’t think it had an ending. I don’t think anyone gets to see that stuff.”

There were some compensations, though. Moss-Bachrach described working alongside Robert Downey Jr. — returning to the MCU as Doctor Doom — as a genuine highlight. “What a wonderful man. Like, what a great set leader he was. He’s been doing this for a long time and he was so generous and really, like, checking in, making sure everyone was good. Really good coach energy there.” He also recalled looking around the room at the assembled cast — which includes Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Mackie, Letitia Wright, the Fox-era X-Men, and more — and having a quiet moment of disbelief. “There’s Ian McKellen, and there’s Channing Tatum. It’s a lot.”

For Jeremy Slater, the whole Fantastic Four saga is clearly just one of those war stories you carry with you in this business. He walked in thinking he was building a legacy. He walked out of a theater wondering what happened. “You always go in with the highest of hopes and the best of aspirations,” he said. “But sometimes the projects don’t turn out the way that you dreamed about or envisioned.”

The 2015 film is currently streaming on Disney+, if you’re feeling brave.