Fantastic Four screenwriter details original script inspired by Harry Potter

The Baxter Foundation’s school was 'envisioned as a sort of Hogwarts for nerds'

Upon its release, Fox’s rebooted Fantastic Four was met with a widely negative reception; the film currently holds a 9% Rotten Tomatoes Rating and an audience score of C-, via Cinescore.

Production was widely known to be a huge mess, not helped by Josh Trak Tweeting out just before its release that “a year earlier” he’d made a “fantastic version of the film” that the general public would “probably never see”. Post-release and many more details about the troubled production have come to light.

In a postmortem of the film, Screen Crush summarised all the information made public by actors/those who worked on the film, while also speaking to Jeremy Slater, credited as one of the film’s three screenwriters.

Slater detailed how he submitted “10-15 drafts” of the film, yet only one line of dialogue (a young Reed Richards saying “Don’t blow up” at the beginning of the film) made the final cut, something he describes as “fairly normal” for a blockbuster of this size.

Interestingly, various plot points - having the four heroes and Victor Von Doom travel to an alternate place via a portal, Reed and Ben Grimm opening the film as children, Reed being recruited by the Baxter Foundation - were kept (to a degree) from Slater’s drafts, yet the "humour, heart, and spectacle" were replaced by a more serious tone.

Differences include the Baxter Foundation’s school being “envisioned as a sort of Hogwarts for nerds: a school filled with young geniuses zipping around on prototype hoverboards and experimenting with anti-gravity and teleportation and artificial lifeforms.” Meanwhile, instead of travelling to Planet Zero, the heroes were going to travel to the Negative Zone and fight an enemy named Annihilus.

He told the publication: “In addition, we had Doctor Doom declaring war against the civilised world, the Mole Man unleashing a 60 foot genetically-engineered monster in downtown Manhattan, a commando raid on the Baxter Foundation, a Saving Private Ryan-style finale pitting our heroes against an army of Doombots in war-torn Latveria, and a post-credit teaser featuring Galactus and the Silver Surfer destroying an entire planet.”

The problem, however, came down to budget, with Fox unwilling to spend $300 million on a Fantastic Four film. Slater added: “It’s understandable that everyone involved would take steps to minimize their risk as much as possible. Unfortunately, those steps probably compromised the film to a fatal degree.”

Previously, one of the film’s producers explained what went wrong with the film, saying the dark tone didn’t necessarily suit the characters. Perhaps they should have stuck to the Harry Potter-esque plot-line.