FANTASTIC FOUR: Villain Rumor Round-Up

As casting for Twentieth Century Fox’s reboot of their Fantastic Four franchise starts to ramp up, a story started to spread this week that the studio may consider a female actress for the role of the FF’s long-time arch nemesis Dr. Victor Von Doom. Cue the fan outrage.

But as he has done in the past, Trank took to twitter to immediately dispel that rumor.

https://twitter.com/josh_trank/statuses/431312688514609152

Of course, Trank decided to stir things up a bit with a follow-up tweet.

https://twitter.com/josh_trank/statuses/431321964490137600

Well, given the recent flurry of activity from Fox’s legal department to various website (including ourselves) over the “purported plot details” that made the rounds a few weeks back that Trank denied were true, I think we know to which one he was referring.

But maybe Trank is denying the Doom-as-a-woman rumor because the character of Dr. Doom isn’t in the script? Granted, the villain is the FF’s most recognizable foe, but he has been done to death in the films, having been featured in the previously released FF films from Fox as well as the unreleased, Roger Corman-produced film from the 1990s. I could understand if Trank decided to go in a different direction in terms of whom the group would face off against.

So who would that new villain be? AMC’s John Schnepp thinks he knows, and casually dropped that into a discussion of the film in a recent installment of their AMC movietalk podcast (at about the 2:04 mark).

Did I mention Annihilus as the main villian? Huh…weird… http://t.co/WwFxwrizF7

— Jon Schnepp (@JonSchnepp) January 24, 2014

So, who is this Annihilus you ask? Well, he’s an megalomanical insectoid warlord from an other-dimensional realm known as the Negative Zone who has tried, and failed repeatedly, to invade our universe.

Schnepp reportedly has some ties to the visual effects community and that may be his source here. Schnepp is also a director on the adult swim cartoon The Venture Bros., which once featured a superpowered quartet called The Impossibles, a dark parody of the Fantastic Four. It isn’t too much of a stretch to think that he may have a line on some information that hasn’t really made more public rounds yet.

And Schnepp’s assertion that Annihilus is going to be the main baddie suddenly makes a comment from Mark Millar, who has been working with Fox on overseeing both their Fantastic Four and X-Men franchises, made a year ago about Trank’s planned story for the film.

What I wasn’t expecting actually was just how funny and likeable he could make this as well as getting the more awesome moments on screen – I use awesome in the traditional British sense and not the California sense awesome, you know? The Ridley Scott moments, and the Fantastic Four really are jaw-dropping in the same way you feel when you saw Alien for the first time. There’s some moments in this – not to be specific – that are actually gonna be phenomenal on screen and stuff you haven’t seen in a superhero movie before.

Invoking Ridley Scott and Alien seemed kind of strange at the time, but it suddenly makes more sense if Annihilus, perhaps backed up by an alien army, is slated to appear. And while we just saw a team of superheroes beat up on invading extra-dimensional aliens in The Avengers, the fact that this is still a much grander and epic idea for a Fantastic Four film than we’ve seen in the past I do find intriguing. It’s almost interesting enough to forget the bad taste that the possible direction Trank is taking he characters has left in my mouth.