The Fantastic Four (found unreleased Marvel superhero film; 1994)

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Ffour.jpg

Official poster used for promotion.

Status: Found

Date found: Unknown

Found by: A dubbing company (possibly Lightning Dubs)

The Fantastic Four is a low-budget feature film which completed in 1994 but never saw an official release. It was produced by Roger Corman (famous for his low-budget productions) and Bernd Eichinger (who also produced another Fantastic Four movie in 2005 and its 2007 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). The film was based on the popular comic book series of the same name by Marvel Comics and featured the origin of the Fantastic Four and their first battle with the evil Doctor Doom and a mysterious Mole Man-like creature.

Production

Production began on December 28th, 1992, under music video director Oley Sassone.[1] Storyboards were drawn by artist Pete Von Sholly. The 25-day production was shot on the Concorde Pictures soundstage in Venice, California, as well as in Agoura, California for a spacecraft crash scene, the Loyola Marymount campus for a lab explosion scene, and the former Pacific Stock Exchange building in downtown Los Angeles for team meeting scenes.

Release Plans and Cancellation

A 1993 magazine article gave a tentative release date of Labor Day weekend 1993. That summer, trailers ran in theatres and on the VHS tapes of the movie Carnosaur. Cast members promoted the film at a clips-screening at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and at the San Diego Comic-Con International. By this time, the world premiere was announced to take place at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 19th, 1994, with proceeds from the event earmarked for the charities Ronald McDonald House and the Children's Miracle Network.

Producer Bernd Eichinger later announced that the film would not be released. Following the announcement of the cancellation of the film's release, a rumor spread that the studio intended this version of the Fantastic Four to be the film equivalent of an ashcan copy: they had the legal rights to create a film based on the Fantastic Four, but they were not ready to produce a big-budget film. However, they needed to produce something or else they would lose the legal right to the characters. According to this narrative, the studio allegedly misled everyone involved in the making of the film by letting them believe it was going to be a genuine release rather than a way to maintain their license on the property. Producer Roger Corman has since stated he agrees with this narrative.

Some cast and crew imply Corman had the power to retain control over the film, but chose not to. Corman seemed to sign off, and financially profit from the sale of the movie to producers Avi Arad and Bernd Eichinger, including all the original film stock, way after the alleged conspiracy against the film took place. Corman has since called the pirated release of the movie a, "theft". The director of the film, Oley Sassone, claims Corman consciously leveraged the existence of a finished film for purely financial reasons, and without much concern for anything else.

The star of the film, Alex Hyde-White, has stated in interviews that he doesn't buy the "myth" that the film was never intended to be released from the onset. He calls such claims a conspiracy theory looking for a simple answer to a complex situation. Hyde-White suggests Avi Arad was the only person proven to have hostility toward the film. He also suggests there was a 'fork in the road' at some point about the film's release. He further suggests the aggressive campaign by cast and crew to market the film without the studio's blessing was the ultimate catalyst for the studio's decision not to release the film. Many former cast and crew saw the movie as a "major break", and a way to boost their resume, and so they took money out of their own pocket to improve the film and advertise it.

The VP of marketing at the studio behind the film named Jonathan Fernandez contradicts Hyde-White and states he believes the dominant narrative that the film was never intended to be released. Marvel expert and author Sean Howe claims the catalyst for the cancellation was Avi Arad hearing about the Mall of America premiere of the movie from a random child.

Availability

The Israeli-American film producer, 'Avi Arad' purchased the finalized film from Roger Corman, with the help of Bernd Eichinger, for 1-2 million dollars. Avi claimed he subsequently 'burned' the original celluloid for the film. While his purchase is not disputed, the cast and crew of the film think he is exaggerating and estimate that the original 35mm film is in a Marvel-owned warehouse somewhere.

It was hypothesized the film was initially copied via telecine a few days before a private screening, and that this produced the many subsequent VHS bootlegs which circulated before 2004.

A VHS-copy transfer was eventually uploaded to MySpleen and has since been mirrored to other video-sharing websites such as YouTube and Dailymotion.

A documentary about the 1994 Fantastic Four called Doomed was released in 2015. It sheds more light into where the bootlegs probably came from. The director of the film, Oley Sassone, states he thinks all bootlegs originated from a rogue employee at "Lightning Dubs", which was creating dubs for his own personal use. In the same documentary, Oley recalls hunting for original film prints in Roger Coreman's storage room in Venice to release without permission via telecine, and allegedly found nothing.

Free circulating copies

The film had previously been circulating through sales of pirated VHS copies of the film in comic conventions and Ebay. This occurred to the point that the stars of the film were recognized in public.

Ever since a poor-quality, nth generation, pirated VHS copy of the film was uploaded to the internet for free streaming, it further achieved a cult following.[2]

Most or all copies of the movie currently available on the internet for free, as of 2023, are of unknown generation, and are poor quality. Some Youtube projects involve digital tampering of VHS copies of unknown origin to improve the picture quality.

Cast and crew estimate that the attempt to censor the film led to more viewership than would have occurred if the film had an official release.

Youtube footage

Uncropped, unknown generation

Cropped to widescreen, unknown generation

Alleged first-gen pirated copy

Doomed producers later released what they claim is a full digital transfer of the original 3/4" U-matic layoff (from telecine) which all bootlegs of Fantastic Four originated from. If this is true, the copy available at doomedfilms.bigcartel.com is the best quality, unaltered, full version of the film that will ever exist, unless an official release happens.

References

External Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fantastic_Four_(unreleased_film) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109770/