Unreleased Fantastic Four movie?

Cafe Society
1

The IMDb trivia page for the new Fantastic Four movie says:

Are they saying that this studio made an entire movie with all the trimmings (if they skipped something important, how was the cast and crew kept uninformed?) and then just didn’t release it? If you don’t want to make a Fantastic Four movie, fine, then you don’t make it. But if you spend all the money making it, what possible gain could there be from not releasing it once it’s made? What’s the scoop?

2

Yes. it’s true, the film was never intended for public release. I have a copy and it’s pretty bad. Oddly enough, Dr. Doom and the Thing’s costumes aren’t that bad. The effects for the Human Torch and Sue Storm, however…

3

Where did you get it? Why was it never released?

4

It’s a Roger Corman movie. Not a good one, either.

And as for where? “Around.” Convention, on the net, somewhere. It’s well distributed for an unreleased and really bad movie.

5

‘Film Threat’ magazine printed stills or screen shots from basically the entire movie, since it wasn’t going to be released.

6

How do you screw up invisibility? You just have the other three actors on the set, while she’s back in her trailer. Action!

7

So why wasn’t it released? Seriously, why not release it once you’ve made it?

8

I bought a copy at a Sci-Fi convention years ago. It was great to watch with friends and laugh at it. If they had released it with that intent they’d have made a bundle.

They had the balls to blatantly ripp off the first Max Fliescher Supermab cartoon, so they get points for audacity.

9

Best line of the day. Pure comey gold.

10

Sorry, the ‘d’ key’s not working well.

11

You obviously work for the Department of Redundancy Department.

12

Based on totally unsubstantiated rumor and my limited understandings of copyright and suchlike things, I believe the filmed the movie because they had the rights to it for a short time, said time being extended if they made the movie. They knew they couldn’t do the movie right but they wanted to be able to make it some time in the future, so they filmed a crappy dud just to keep dibs on the rights.

If I’m wrong, please call me a gullible doof and explain why they did this.

13

Speaking as an aficionado of bad movies, this was not even a good bad movie. It wasn’t horribly painful, either, but it was no Little Shop of Horrors. Even if it was no Red Zone Cuba. Just really lackluster and boring.

14

That’s pretty much exactly what the IMDb trivia entry says. It’s still not an answer to the question I’d most like to see answered, though.

Why, once you have made a movie, do you abstain from releasing it?

15

As far as I can see, the answer is in YOUR OP, is it not? They had to start production by a certain date or lose the rights, Obviously it was cheaper to spin out some filem they never intend to release than to give up the rights (and future profits).

…which I’ll remember next time I have to sit through an anti-piracy trailer out out by the oh-so-poor film industry, just before I watch a movie I, you know, PAID for.

16

Yes, but once again, once the movie is produced, why do you not release it? Why not reimburse what you can?

17

If it was a bomb anyway, they probably didn’t want to spend even more money on reproduction, distribution, and advertising costs.

18

My WAG is one of two scenarios:

  1. Marvel may have paid Corman not to do so. A movie of this awful proportions will do more harm than good to the characters, and translate to dangerous returns on future Marvel products. Since Marvel was, at the time, trying to forge a deal with Sony on future Marvel properties, this movie would have been a serious stumbling block to any sort of deal.

I find this less likely than #2, FWIW.

  1. Corman didn’t have the funds to properly promote and release this film. The admittedly-generous Hollywood estimate is that you’ll end up spending close to the film’s budget on marketing, promotion and box-office release costs alone. After sinking all the cash into this movie to make it “just-plain-awful” quality, it probably didn’t make any sense to double the budget just to take a bath on it. Corman simply wrote off the losses and moved on.

Somewhat likely, but others believe #3:

  1. Corman bought the rights to the FF movie during one of Marvel’s slow periods, when they needed quick cash fast. Shortly before 1994, Corman realized the rights he had purchased were about to expire. Rather than give up the rights and, thus, the cash he’d fronted for it, he managed to scrape up $2 million and produced a film he never intended to release. This film was produced with the intent that Marvel would have to deal with him to produce any future FF movies, and thus earn him a hefty dollar on the back-end.
    The truth? We’ll never know why the movie was so bad, why it was produced in the first place, and how much Marvel paid Corman to regain the film rights to their property. But it does provide us a quick piece of interesting trivia, and Corman (ever the PT Barnum of the movie set) never went broke underestimating the Hollywood formula.
19

Yeah, just getting a movie into theaters isn’t cheap. You have to pay to have the prints made (and a wide release these days means thousands of prints), and for advertising.

And since they only made this so they could keep the rights, I don’t think they wanted to poison the audience against the later movie. If a really awful Fantastic Four movie came out and bombed, would you go to see another one by the same people a few years later?

That said, I’d like to see what they came up with. Plus, I’ve seen the woman who played Sue in other things, and she’s a babe.

20

Okay, so I got bored and was mildly curious about this movie so I googled around a bit.

I think this page sums up quite handily why they never released the movie:

It’s in Italian, it seems, but pictures are worth a thousand words each…