‘Fantastic Four’ Comic-Con Trailer: It’s (Almost) Clobbering Time

My favorite line in the new trailer for Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four, which was just released online after its debut last weekend at Comic-Con, is the one spoken by Reg. E. Cathey as Dr. Franklin Storm. “It is our duty as human beings,” he says, “to push forward into the unknown.”

I guess humanity’s duties don’t apply to the folks who run movie studios, because here comes another version of the Fantastic Four!

Then again, there are some new wrinkles to the old formula here. Dr. Doom, for example, is no longer a dictator who rules an Eastern European country; now he’s a hacker or something. And the Thing no longer wears pants. He’s just walking around naked all the time! That’s got to be an awkward way to fight crime. Wait, is this why they call him “the Thing”? I guess that makes a certain amount of sense.

As a fan of Trank’s Chronicle, I’m hoping for the best here. The cast is certainly top-notch; Miles Teller as Mr. Fantastic, Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch, Kate Mara as the Invisible Woman, and Jamie Bell as the non-naked-rock-guy version of the Thing, plus Toby Kebbell as Doom. I suspect some folks might get confused by the presence of Tim Blake Nelson, who played the Leader in The Incredible Hulk; he’s playing a different character here because Fantastic Four isn’t part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But you probably knew that just from the black costumes, the moody cinematography, the gritty characters, and the Thing’s thing. It definitely doesn’t look like a “Marvel movie.”

Fantastic Four opens in theaters on August 7. Here’s a UK version of the trailer, which features a few lines of dialogue for the Thing. None of them are “Hey, does anyone have a pair of jorts lying around I could borrow?”