First 'Fantastic Four' teaser trailer goes dark

Posted Tuesday, January 27, 2015 at 11:17 AM Central
Last updated Tuesday, January 27, 2015 at 2:50 PM Central

by John Couture

Quick, how many Marvel films are coming out this year?

If you said two, you would be correct. If you said three, you would also technically be correct.

Ah, the joys of having Marvel's cinematic rights still spread out between three studios (Sony - Spider-man, Fox - X-Men & Fantastic Four, Disney - All the rest). The reality is that before Marvel starting making their own movies and launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), they made a few quick bucks by licensing these character to other studios to make films.

The results were mixed at best (X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-man 3), but their rights suddenly became much more valuable when the MCU took off and the world fell in love with Marvel characters and films. Unfortunately, the rights issues cause obvious headaches, like Spider-man's glaring absence from The Avengers, and studios must release films in a certain period of time or risk the rights reverting back to Marvel.

Which brings us to this year's "Marvel" film The Fantastic Four. It's not technically a Marvel film, despite Fox's best attempts to advertise it as such in the teaser trailer below. It's not a part of the MCU, but Fox needed to make another Fantastic Four film or risk losing their rights back to Marvel.

With such incredibly low expectations, especially after the abysmal Fantastic 4 and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (and yes, that is future Captain America Chris Evans playing Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch), anything resembling a decent film would be met with cheers. This morning, those cheers went up when the first teaser trailer for The Fantastic Four reboot hit the Internet.

While it's hard to get much in terms of plot from this teaser, it does appear that they are taking a page out of the DC universe and making the film much darker than previous Marvel films. I was hoping that we'd see something more along the lines of last year's Guardians of the Galaxy, but they decided to play it straight.

In an interesting twist, Fox also released a commentary trailer in which director Josh Trank and writer Simon Kinberg break down the teaser.

This time around, Fox went a bit younger with Miles Teller as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Kate Mara as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch and Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm/The Thing. The Fantastic Four debuts in theaters on August 7.

What do you think of the trailer?