In the market, if a movie has a good response, or if the film owner thinks it has potential, then a sequel will be launched.
However, some series of movie sequels are more mature and complete because of the more mature and complete production system (such as the "Captain America" series), but some sequels are reversed because of various reasons.
For example, the "Fantastic Four 2" we are going to talk about today.
sequel plan
The "Fantastic Four" movie released in 2005 brought the Fantastic Four, Marvel's oldest team of heroes to the big screen, but embarrassingly, 's final box office results were quite ordinary, and word of mouth was not good. how about it.
Generally speaking, for movies with such ordinary results, it is normal for the sequel to be stopped directly, but the film producer Fox finally started the sequel plan. Why is
?
Everyone knows that Marvel sold the film and television rights of many of its heroes back then, and every hero agreement that was sold had an agreement. had to shoot a film and television work within the specified X years. Otherwise, the copyright will be automatically recovered. For example, Spider-Man has a 5-year period.
And the Fantastic Four, as the hero team that was sold out, naturally have this kind of regulation.
2005 "Fantastic Four" movie, although the score is average, , but the overall profitable , for Fox, it is the right choice to continue to build it into a series to obtain stable income and copyright continuation. .
But choosing the right choice does not mean that the result must be satisfactory. The "Fantastic Four 2" released in 2007 is far inferior to the predecessor in terms of box office and word of mouth. Its low performance directly caused Fox to risk the copyright and be published. The risks of Granville recovery will all terminate the series of plans.
specific to the movie "Fantastic Four 2", it has committed the same problem as the previous one, that is, " chose the wrong positioning" . As a result, although the film has bright spots, the shortcomings are more obvious.
sequel positioning
Generally speaking, a movie sequel has two general positioning directions. The first type of
is to further expand while taking over the framework built by the previous work by . In other words, it is the so-called "expanded world view" of , such as the "Reunion" and "Fast and Furious" series. The second type of
is that continues to focus on the continuation and development of the story under the framework of its previous work, such as the "Mission Impossible" and "Spider-Man" series. These two positionings of
do not mean that they can be chosen arbitrarily, must be measured according to the setting of the first work and the IP background story.
For example, "Reunion", behind it has the huge IP of Marvel Comics and almost inexhaustible resources, so it has the capital to expand its worldview.
is another example of "Quick Excitement", the first work is an open story, and it is an overhead world view, so it also provides basic conditions for the subsequent expansion of the framework.
So, the question is, does the "Fantastic Four" symbol meet the conditions for expanding the world view?
First of all, although the Fantastic Four is the hero team of Marvel, , the copyright held by Fox is not enough to expand the worldview of this series .
In layman's terms, Fox doesn't have many cards in his hand, just the copyright of the heroes and villains. Building an X-Men worldview has exhausted resources, and there is no room left to build a Fantastic Four universe.
Therefore, if the Fantastic Four wants to take the first positioning, it must be linked with the "X-Men" series, but apparently Fox has no plans.
So overall, "Fantastic Four 2" is actually more suitable for the second orientation.
But unfortunately, this movie chose the first positioning in the end, so you can see a lot of quite inconsistent settings throughout the movie.
"Pseudo World View Expansion"
In order to expand the world view, "Fantastic Four 2" adds two heavyweight characters to the story, namely Planet Devourer and Silver Shadowman. The two characters of
are both cosmic-level "big guys",In other words, as long as they want, destroy the whole earth or something is simply pediatric.
"Fantastic Four 2" has an obvious intention to join them, which is to expand the pattern by elevating the story to a world-class crisis.
But I have to say that is actually a trick. The reason for
is very simple. There is a huge power gap between the protagonist group and these two characters. The gap between can be said to be a different dimension.
Although the abilities of the Fantastic Four are good, they are obviously limited to small-scale battlefields, fighting cosmic wars? It's totally unreliable.
And precisely because the protagonist's 4-member team and the villain's strength gap is too big, is so big that the plot kills and weakens the villain can't make up for it. Therefore, the movie had to move the first villain Doctor Doomsday out to let them come. Faced with a group of four, and set the Silver Shadowman as a teammate on the side of the Fantastic Four, letting him lead the response to the Planet Devourer.
wants to grasp everything, then the result must be nothing. The same is true for
"Fantastic Four 2", because there are too many characters, and the settings are very different from each other, so the plot is almost impossible to come true, and the set of characters is also very serious. For example, the planet Devourer will destroy the earth. , Dr. Doom is still messing with the group of 4 on the street, which is really laughable.
The leader of the line of the Planet Devourer itself is also the Silver Shadowman instead of the 4-man group. After all, the strength of the four heroes is too low to affect the overall situation.
All of this is actually due to the wrong positioning. If you go in the second direction at the beginning, you don’t have to move out of the Planet Devourer and Silver Shadowman. Even if Dr. Doom comes back, you just need to polish it well to win. The previous work is actually not that difficult.
Unfortunately, in normal difficulty and hell difficulty, the director finally chose the latter.
"false end" becomes "true end"
In fact, the "disaster" caused by positioning errors does not only exist in the human setting.
usually see characters in film and television dramas saying, such as "I will marry you when I come back" we are getting married" and other lines, or there is a plot of two people preparing to get married, then the next direction is not difficult to guess.
Either the role of the flag is set to lead the lunch, or the real marriage is, and the finale.
What is interesting is that this kind of plot also appeared in the sequel to "Fantastic Four 2".
in the movie , Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Girl are getting married, but things are definitely not going so smoothly. The Silver Shadowman has disturbed the marriage once, and the marriage failed.
Everyone should be able to guess next, because they are going to get married so the group of 4 experienced After a turbulent dissolution, one of the couples was about to "leave". You can see the invisible woman almost hanging up. Of course, because of the protagonist's aura, she still survived.
finally ended, they successfully married.
By the way, the stone man in the group of 4 also found a partner who didn’t dislike him and got a destination.
Of course, although "Fantastic Four 2" is indeed the last work of this series in reality, was just a series when it was filmed. It’s just the second work, and the plan at the time was a third one.
But since the positioning is not the end work, I always put the plot that is suitable for the end work on the stage. This makes it a bit nondescript, after all Tony Stark did not marry Pepper and gave birth to Morgan in "Iron Man 2", right?
asked if there were children's shoes, so why do so many "closing plots" have to be filmed in this movie?
actually put it plainly, just to add drama to the Fantastic Four.
As mentioned above, the big villain Planet Devourer in this movie cannot be dealt with by the Fantastic Four. The main guide of this line is the Silver Shadow, and this is the case. Article is the main line.
Therefore, in order to increase the presence of the 4-member group, can only use this kind of ending plot as a gimmick.
But I have to say that the effect is not very good, after all, it is at the universe level. In the face of the crisis, it was too difficult to divert the audience’s attention with the so-called protagonist’s wedding, and "Fantastic Four 2" did not do it either.To this point.
On the whole, "Fantastic Four 2" is a complete retrogression of compared to the previous work in terms of performance, word of mouth or the quality of the film itself. In this case, it is also helpless for Fox to terminate the series plan.
However, after 8 years, Fox restarted the series again, but that is another story...
