20th Century Fox is currently in the midst of its merger with Disney. It’s no secret the merger means that Marvel Studios has regained ownership of characters from the X-Men and Fantastic Four universes.
Back in 2011 Fox also still owned several other Marvel properties including Daredevil.
Screenwriter Zack Stentz recently made an appearance on Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin’s Fatman Beyond podcast and had some interesting revelations about plans Fox had for its Marvel characters.
“My ex-partner and I, when we were working at Fox and we were working on X-Men: First Class, we did a secret movie for them that, I can’t tell you what the plot was, but I can tell you that it used all of the characters, all of the Marvel characters that Fox had at the time in 2011,” said Stentz. “It used the X-Men. It used the Fantastic Four. It used Daredevil. It used Deadpool. Daredevil was still at Fox at the time. We almost had Paul Greengrass directing it which would’ve been so cool but he had another project to do instead. It didn’t end up going, but it was a script I was really proud of and it would’ve been really good.”
During the interview it also transpired that Stentz worked on a version of the script for Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four.
“The other thing that’s never going to happen is the version that Ash and I did of the Fantastic Four,” added Stentz. “Josh Trank, who ended up doing the Fantastic Four that we saw in the theaters, we were supposed to be writing the script for him, but nobody told him that we were doing it. So, when he officially signed on he was like, ‘Why are you imposing these other writers on me? I want to use my own writer. I wanna do my own script.’”
“And he did his version instead,” continued Stentz. “It was one of those hammer blows to our career at the time, even though we had gotten paid, because I was so freakin’ proud of that script. It was how the Fantastic Four were almost the Fantastic Five except a young man named Victor von Doom was just too damaged and f***ed up to be part of them. It was a script I was very proud of. Josh Trank didn’t wanna do it. Even though it hurt like a motherf***er that they didn’t use our script, I don’t blame him.”
Makes you wonder what could have been doesn’t it?
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