Fox Pushes "Fantastic Four", Daredevil" Reboots

Comic-Con News: Twentieth Century Fox may not have a major institutional presence at Comic-Con this year, but the studio made waves by announcing its firm intentions to reboot two of its dormant Marvel Comics-based franchises, the Fantastic Four and Daredevil. Of course Marvel’s "use it or loose it" motion picture licensing agreements make it mandatory for the studios who hold the rights to Marvel characters to use them or let them revert to Marvel Studios. No studio wants to relive the red-faced embarrassment of Paramount after Marvel Studios scored a major hit with the Iron Man property, which Paramount had acquired and then relinquished.

So in spite of two disappointing (both financially and critically) Fantastic Four films, Fox is far from giving up on the property. According to Deadline, Fox has indicated that it has convinced the hot young director Josh Trank, who helmed the sleeper hit Chronicle and has been mentioned as a likely helmer for a Venom movie, to preside over a rebooting of the FF franchise at Fox. In fact Deadline states flatly that the Fantastic Four will be "the next Marvel property to be slated for production and dated for release by the studio."

The clock is ticking on Daredevil at Fox. The studio has a script it likes, but director David Slade, who has been attached to the project since early in 2011 has bowed out of this reboot because of scheduling conflicts. Look for the announcement of a director for the Daredevil reboot soon, because the film has to be in production by this fall or Fox could lose the rights to the character.

Fox Sets Date for 'X-Men: First Class' Sequel and 'POTA' Sequel

Twentieth Century Fox has announced that the sequel to X-Men: First Class, which for scheduling purposes is now known simply as “X-Men,” will debut on July 18th, 2014.  The X-Men: First Class sequel, which Matthew Vaughn will direct, will begin production early next year. The cast of X-Men: First Class, which includes The Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence, is set to reprise their roles in the sequel.

Vaughn’s X-Men film will actually be Fox’s third summer tentpole for 2014. It will be preceded by Dawn of Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the highly successful Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which earned $483 million worldwide in 2011. As was the case with Matthew Vaughn and the X-Men: First Class sequel, the director of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rupert Wyatt, will return to direct the encore movie.

The first Fox blockbuster to unspool in 2014 will be Steven Spielberg’s Robopocalypse, which the studio is producing along with Dreamworks and Disney. It will debut worldwide on April 25th, 2014. Robopocalypse is based on the bestselling science fiction novel by Daniel H. Wilson.


Fox also announced that it would be re-releasing Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day in re-processed 3-D on July 3rd, 2013, though adding “depth” to the cardboard characters in this overripe exercise in mind-numbing silliness will take more than all the computing power of Silicon Valley put together.