Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Spidey's the celeb of the year. Blade and the X-Men are huge, with Daredevil, Iron Man and the Hulk waiting in the wings. When will Hollywood show some love for Marvel's venerable Fantastic Four?
Jun 5, 2002 | In the month since its domestic release, Columbia Pictures' "Spider-Man" has racked up the kind of box-office numbers industry insiders only dream about. As of the end of May it had already become the sixth highest-grossing film of all time in the United States, and promises to perform similar miracles when it opens in Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand in early June. Stateside, the film has broken nearly every record imaginable, including biggest opening weekend, biggest single day and fastest to $100 million, a level it attained in just three days of release. Not bad for a comic book title that just turned 40.
It's hard to believe that there are that many ticket-buying Spidey fans, but the figures don't lie. Accordingly, just about every Marvel Comics superhero ever to have his or her own title is slated for the megabudget Hollywood treatment over the next few years.
Fox has a sequel to its popular "X-Men" movie and a screen version of "Daredevil" (with Ben Affleck as the supersensitive blind hero) in the works for 2003, while Universal is currently priming audiences for "The Hulk" with a theatrical trailer 13 months in advance of the film's scheduled release date. New Line, meanwhile, has announced a third "Blade" installment and a celluloid interpretation of "Iron Man" for 2004, and even second-string crime fighters like "The Punisher," "Iron Fist" and "Ghost Rider" (a fetish-wear-clad biker with a flaming skull for a head) are set to kick multiplex ass before the decade is over.
The ability to rake in the kind of money "Spider-Man" has means more than just rampant copycatting, however. Everyone from Jonah Goldberg at the National Review to cartoonist Gary Panter in the New York Times Magazine to seemingly the entire staff of the Guardian, Britain's left-leaning daily, has weighed in on the cultural gravity of Peter Parker and his angsty, acrobatic alter ego, and there's undoubtedly more hand-wringing and hosannas to come. The French, after all, haven't had their turn yet.
But what about the Fantastic Four, who paved the way for Spider-Man's successful mix of heroism and neurosis and beat him to his 40th birthday by almost a full year? Whither the critical canoodling over Marvel's original band of superfreaks?
Timing is everything, of course, and the absence of big-screen sanctification of the Four helped put their pivotal anniversary beneath the pop-culture punditry radar. Yet the reluctance to give the title its due -- to say nothing of the blockbuster treatment -- is downright curious. As it stands, Fox may or may not be developing a "Fantastic Four" movie that may or may not be a comedy, and the risible, no-budget 1994 indie version produced by B-movie mogul Roger Corman was shelved long before the hyperdriven CGI thrills of "Spider-Man" magnified its shortcomings. What accounts for this skittishness and indifference?
It could be something in the nature and dynamics of the team. In most respects, the Fantastic Four aren't that different from other comic book characters. For one thing, they're patently immune to the ravages of time: As of the latest issue, brainy aeronautical engineer Reed Richards, his increasingly pulchritudinous wife, Susan, her kid brother Johnny Storm and their grumpy friend Ben Grimm show none of the usual signs of encroaching middle age. Even the trademark gray at Reed's temples hasn't risen a centimeter in the years since the group first returned from their landmark joyride in space, miraculously and ambivalently endowed with superhuman abilities.
To fans and attentive observers, those powers -- courtesy of pesky cosmic rays and naive sci-fi wish fulfillment -- have become as totemic as the monikers that came with them. As the hyperflexible Mr. Fantastic, Reed has the ability to stretch his limbs to absurd proportions, while Sue can fade to transparency as the Invisible Woman (talk about male wish fulfillment) and Johnny, the Human Torch, enjoys the gifts of combustibility and flight. Ben, in a less appealing transformation, swelled into a rocklike, orange-tinted, ultrastrong "Thing," an unfortunate condition that, despite occasional relapses into human form, seems more or less permanent.
Thinghood notwithstanding, these aren't necessarily undesirable traits to possess; if nothing else, imagine the possibilities open to Mr. and Mrs. Fantastic in the boudoir. Unlike the stiff-upper-lipped superfolk over at rival publisher DC, however, with whom former Marvel editor and series co-creator Stan Lee hoped to compete financially, the newly Fantastic Four took their metamorphoses in something less than stride.
Like Spider-Man after them, it was this all-too-human reaction to catastrophic change, echoed through the years in a multitude of personal crises -- including nasty power struggles and romantic infidelities -- that originally set the Fantastic Four apart from DC's venerable has-beens like Superman and Batman. It's also what put Marvel on the map.
Yet in their way, the Four were always as doomed to ossified iconhood as their Depression-era precursors. For all their timelessness they were just as much of their time, and as such were not all that different from the whiny, narcissistic suburban baby boomers to whom they were initially meant to appeal. Despite the group's hip Manhattan digs, in fact, the Storm siblings are from Long Island and Reed hails from some fictional California backwater called Central City; Ben is the group's only genuine Gothamite. In a cultural climate that vilifies middle-class boomer suburbanites in vehicles like "American Beauty" and "In the Bedroom," who has the patience for anxiety-wracked middle-aged characters, regardless of how radiation-enhanced they may be?
Probably not real-world middle-class boomer suburbanites, who are as likely to identify with DC's supergeezers as their parents once were. And why not? Superman and Batman -- one the emblem of a generation of hardworking immigrants, the other a stylized symbol of an endearingly eccentric elite -- were created when the heroic burden of being American wasn't debated on anything like a wide scale. The myriad sociopolitical nightmares that helped spawn Supes and the Dark Knight were dutifully, conveniently repressed until the two heroes were pulp relics, somewhere around the time Reed Richards finished his doctoral program at Columbia, no doubt. As the Fantastic Four's original fans wage their own battle with middle age, having a truly invincible icon or two along for the scuffle doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
