Coming Soon: Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s “The Fantastic Four”

Coming Soon: Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s “The Fantastic Four”

The year is 1993. Roger Corman, one of the most prolific producer/directors of all time, is overseeing the production of The Fantastic Four film for Constantin Film. They have less than a month and only $1.5 million to bring the story of four scientists turned superheroes by space travel to life. A release date is announced for Labor Day that year, then pushed back to January 1994. Then, nothing. The film never comes out. The rights to the Fantastic Four property stay with Constantin Film and the film is never even completed.

This might sound like the premise of a strange Hollywood comedy, but it really happened. Roger Corman did oversee the production of the first ever Fantastic Four film and it never came out. The whole thing was a twisted game of contracts to hold onto adaptation rights and is now one of the most notorious dirty film business stories to come out of Hollywood (well, without a murder or other such violent crime against anyone).

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