Fantastic Four: The Mudslinging begins.

Film Having had a cold this past couple of day, I entirely missed the Hollywood Reporter piece about Fantastic Four which is glorious in its detail but lacks just the right about of information to make a Final Cut or The Devil's Candy style book about the fiasco a tempting prospect. Notably this paragraph:

"As filming wound toward an unhappy close, the studio and producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker engaged in a last-minute scramble to come up with an ending. With some of the cast not fully available at that point and Kinberg juggling X-Men: Apocalypse and Star Wars, a lot of material was shot with doubles and the production moved to Los Angeles to film scenes with Teller against a green screen. "It was chaos," says a crewmember, adding that Trank was still in attendance "but was neutralized by a committee." Another source says the studio pulled together "a dream team," including writer and World War Z veteran Drew Goddard, to rescue the movie. Whether the final version of the film is better or worse than what Trank put together is a matter of opinion, of course, but the consensus, clearly, is that neither was good."

Wow,  The usually brilliant Drew Goddard allegedly was sucked into this singularity as well. Did he actually write and direct any of the closing material?  Was he another bystander on the road and we'll discover he didn't really have anything to do with it either in the end?  What again, we ask, was (the curiously unmentioned in this piece) Matthew Vaughn's participation?

Meanwhile, here's the also usually brilliant Richard Brody in the New Yorker seeming to make the case for the film almost being a comic book film for people who don't like comic book films, even though in my experience, people who don't like comic book films will never like comic book films.