Jeremy Slater, screenwriter of Mortal Kombat 2, has given an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in which he talked about his work on the film and his career in general. He discussed the challenges of working in Hollywood and in the film industry overall, but also one of the biggest failures he has worked on: the 2015 reboot of The Fantastic Four.
A movie with everything to succeed
Directed by Josh Trank, who had just been acclaimed for the superhero movie Chronicle, this was a film that had everything to succeed. With Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell playing the four main heroes, they had everything needed to be a hit: a generous budget, a director with a great success behind him, recognizable rising actors, and, according to Slater himself, an excellent script.
“For a period of two years, I was walking around with a lot of confidence. It was like, ‘Guys, wait for The Fantastic Four. We are the next Christopher Nolan. We have the next trilogy (of The Dark Knight) on the way,'” according to his own statements. But he claims that they changed not only the script to the point that he could hardly recognize anything that was on screen when he saw the movie, but he also cannot pinpoint why it happened. “I was not aware of the drama that was happening during the filming,” he stated.
Afirming that “I have nothing against Marvel,” he wanted to clarify that he is still very proud of his script, despite it never seeing the light of day. And while this does not clarify what exactly happened during the filming that led to the disaster that was eventually released, an absolute critical failure and no less catastrophic box office failure (it managed to raise around 168 million with an estimated cost of 200), it does demonstrate the difficulty of making movies as big as those from Disney.
