• Screenwriter Jeremy Slater says he didn’t know his Fantastic Four script was discarded until he watched the finished film in theaters
• Slater told THR he had been confidently telling people the reboot would be “the next Dark Knight trilogy” for two years
• The 2015 film, directed by Josh Trank, holds a 9% Rotten Tomatoes score and lost an estimated $80–$100 million for 20th Century Fox
• Miles Teller, who played Mister Fantastic, previously suggested “one really important person” ruined the film
• The Fantastic Four have since been rebooted in the MCU, with the new cast set to appear in Avengers: Doomsday this December

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.

The post 2015 Fantastic Four Writer Didn’t Know His Script Was Scrapped Until He Saw the Movie appeared first on Cream.

• Alan Cumming called the X2 set environment “very, very wrong and very just unacceptable” in a new Deadline interview
• His comments are widely understood to reference director Bryan Singer, who has faced numerous misconduct allegations
• Cumming revealed Avengers: Doomsday has secret, unannounced characters — disguised under fake names in the script
• He confirmed he’s not in Doomsday very much, but had “a really lovely time” and still has additional scenes to shoot
• Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026, directed by the Russo brothers

Alan Cumming has some unfinished business with Nightcrawler — and some long-overdue things to say about what it cost him to play the character the first time around.

In a candid new interview with Deadline, the actor opened up about his experience on the 2003 set of X2, describing conditions that left a mark on him and his castmates that they’ve been talking about, quietly, for more than two decades. “There were things that happened on the [X2] set that were just shocking to me,” Cumming said. “The working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable. And we all have talked about it in various ways over the years.”

Cumming didn’t name director Bryan Singer by name, but the context makes it hard to misread. During X2’s production, cast members reportedly threatened a walkout over Singer’s behavior on set. Singer has faced multiple, well-documented allegations of misconduct throughout his career and has consistently denied wrongdoing. Cumming himself had previously spoken about the “hellish” makeup process — hours in the chair to become the blue-skinned, teleporting mutant — but his latest comments make clear that the makeup chair was only part of why he turned down X-Men: The Last Stand.

A Trauma Bond That Lasted 20 Years

What did come out of that difficult production, unexpectedly, was a group of people who genuinely love each other. Cumming told People last month that the shared ordeal forged bonds that have held strong ever since. “It’s one of those films where I think we all were so traumatized we were bonded in trauma, so we stayed in touch,” he said. He’s remained close with Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn, Patrick Stewart, and James Marsden — all of whom, notably, are returning alongside him in Avengers: Doomsday.

That reunion, it turns out, has been genuinely healing. “Going back to it after all these years was great because I really liked the character,” Cumming told Deadline. “To go back and play him now and also this film is like superhero soup. There’s so many of them in it. I just can’t keep up.”

He also had warm words for the Russo brothers, who are directing the film after their celebrated MCU run with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame. “I really liked the brothers who directed it, and everyone was so nice.” Principal photography wrapped in September 2025, but Cumming confirmed he still has an additional shoot coming — so Nightcrawler’s role, small as it may be, isn’t entirely locked in yet.

Secret Characters, Fake Names, and Superhero Soup

Here’s where things get interesting for Marvel fans: Cumming let slip that the cast list we know isn’t the whole story. The scripts, he said, were deliberately obscured to keep certain returns under wraps. “Sometimes there were secret names in it because they didn’t want to let out that this certain character was coming back, so they called them somebody else in the script. It was so confusing.”

Given the swirling rumors — Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man among the most frequently cited — Cumming’s confirmation that there are surprises even the scoopers haven’t cracked will keep fans busy until a trailer finally drops. The latest word suggests one could arrive as soon as late May or mid-June.

The confirmed cast alone is already staggering: Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, Anthony Mackie as Captain America, Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Kelsey Grammer as Beast, James Marsden as Cyclops, Channing Tatum as Gambit, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Florence Pugh as Yelena, and many more.

As for how much screen time Cumming actually gets amid all of that? He was refreshingly honest. “I’m not in it very much, but I really had fun and it was a really lovely thing to go back to.” He paused on that for a moment, then added something that’s hard not to smile at: “It’s kind of great being a superhero at 60. It’s not so bad.”

Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026.

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• Joe Russo says spoiler culture has become “over-policed” and that films must hold up beyond their initial surprises.
• His comments mark a notable shift from the #ThanosDemandsYourSilence era of Infinity War and Endgame.
• Angela Russo-Otstot, CCO of the Russos’ production company AGBO, says there’s “serious lockdown” on Doomsday details internally.
• Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters December 18, 2026, followed by Secret Wars on December 17, 2027.
• The film already features a massive cast spanning the MCU, Fox’s X-Men franchise, and The Fantastic Four.

Joe Russo has a message for everyone anxiously guarding their timelines ahead of Avengers: Doomsday: maybe breathe a little. In a new interview with Metro UK, the co-director of the most anticipated superhero film in years opened up about his evolving relationship with spoiler culture — and it turns out the man who once begged the internet to keep Thanos’s secrets isn’t quite so precious about it anymore.

“On one hand, audiences want to be surprised, and that’s part of what makes the theatrical experience exciting,” Russo told Metro. “On the other hand, it can become a little over-policed, where people are anxious about engaging with anything.”

“We design these films to unfold in a certain way, and we want audiences to feel those moments as intended. But at the same time, you can’t control everything. You have to focus on making something that holds up beyond the initial surprise.”

That last line is the real tell. For Russo, the goal has shifted — or at least matured. A great film shouldn’t live or die by whether you knew the twist coming in. It should be good enough to survive the spoiler.

A Long Way From #ThanosDemandsYourSilence

It wasn’t so long ago that the Russo brothers were doing the exact opposite of shrugging. Back in April 2018, weeks before Avengers: Infinity War opened, Joe and Anthony published an open letter to fans with a #ThanosDemandsYourSilence hashtag asking people to protect the film’s biggest moments. They did it again a year later with #DontSpoilTheEndgame ahead of Avengers: Endgame. Those campaigns became part of Marvel’s cultural mythology — a signal of just how high the stakes felt at the time.

But that was a different era. Infinity War and Endgame were genuine cultural events in a way that’s become increasingly rare. Their trailers even included deliberately misleading shots designed to throw fans off the scent. The bar for that kind of secrecy was extraordinarily high — and maintaining it required an almost military-grade operation.

The approach to Doomsday has already looked different. Marvel rolled out its enormous cast reveal via a directors’ chairs livestream — a five-and-a-half-hour announcement event that confirmed dozens of names who could have easily been kept as surprises. Four teaser trailers have already dropped. Promotional art featuring characters like Doctor Doom has leaked. Costume images have surfaced. The studio seems to be getting ahead of the information, rather than trying to plug every hole.

Whether that’s strategy or acceptance is probably a bit of both.

Inside AGBO, Things Are Still Very Much on Lockdown

While Joe’s public stance is relaxed, the operation behind the scenes tells a slightly different story. Angela Russo-Otstot — the Russos’ sister and Chief Creative Officer of their production company AGBO, which is co-producing both Doomsday and Secret Wars — made clear that protecting the experience still matters deeply to the team.

“We go to great lengths to plot out the most exciting way to reveal certain aspects, especially when you’re working with a known IP that people have such strong connections to and may have expectations around,” she said. “And so, a lot of thought goes into those twists and turns and reveals when it comes to not spoiling it for others. We’re big believers in that and protecting the sanctity of the experience for everybody to enjoy it in the same way.”

She also gave a peek behind the curtain at just how compartmentalized things are internally: “There’s some serious lockdown at our company. And it’s a very limited group that are across the different things that Anthony and Joe are aware of. We may think we know things and we’re wrong!”

That last detail is quietly fascinating — even people inside AGBO may be working with incomplete information. It’s the kind of thing Marvel has done before, feeding different departments different versions of a script to track leaks. Old habits, it seems, die hard.

Russo-Otstot also acknowledged the reality of the modern media landscape with a pragmatism that felt genuinely earned: “We don’t live in that world anymore. There’s far more choice of when you want to engage with something, how soon. There’s so many things going on, how quickly can you get to it?”

What’s Actually at Stake With Doomsday

The reason spoilers feel so loaded for this particular film is the sheer scale of what Marvel is attempting. Avengers: Doomsday isn’t just the first Avengers movie in seven years — it’s a multiverse collision that brings back characters fans thought they’d seen the last of, and introduces others who exist entirely outside the MCU’s established continuity.

The confirmed cast is genuinely staggering: Robert Downey Jr. returning as Victor von Doom/Doctor Doom, Chris Evans back as Steve Rogers, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Anthony Mackie as Captain America, Sebastian Stan, Paul Rudd, Tom Hiddleston, Letitia Wright, Florence Pugh, and Winston Duke on the MCU side. The Fantastic Four’s Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn join them. And then there are the X-Men — Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, and Channing Tatum, reprising roles from Fox’s pre-Disney franchise for the first time within the MCU proper.

That’s a lot of reunions. A lot of moments fans have been waiting years — in some cases, decades — to see. Which is exactly why the spoiler stakes feel so high, even if the director himself is telling everyone to calm down.

Marvel is also planning to re-release Avengers: Endgame in theaters in September in an “Infinity Vision” format, reportedly with new footage designed to bridge the gap between that film and Doomsday. It’s another sign that the studio is leaning into the event-movie energy rather than trying to contain it.

Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026. Avengers: Secret Wars follows on December 17, 2027. Whether the internet manages to stay quiet between now and then is, as Joe Russo might say, entirely out of anyone’s hands.

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