Early ‘Fantastic Four’ Concept Art Reveals Doctor Doom’s Castle

We already know that many things went very wrong behind the scenes of Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four. We also know that, once upon a time, the film was significantly different than the finished product. The latest “Wow, here’s how much this movie changed from conception to execution!” revelation comes from a concept artist who worked on the film. Early on, he was tasked with illustrating Doctor Doom’s castle, a location that doesn’t even exist in the final version.

This batch of concept art comes to us from artist Steve Jung, who posted his work on Facebook with the following message:

Might as well show some work from this movie called Fantastic Four lol. I was on this one early on before all the drama happened... none of my work made it to the movie (kinda glad) since it got changed many times after I left the project. Exploration of the Planet Zero and Victor's castle ideations. Btw the texture of the terrain is cigarette buds from a picture of the director's ashtray.

As you can see from the images below, his depiction of Planet Zero (the mysterious alternate dimension where the Fantastic Four gain their powers) is still basically in line with the finished version. It’s a desolate alien landscape, albeit one with a different color scheme.

The pieces depicting Doom’s monolithic castle are far more interesting. We know that, at some point in development, Victor Von Doom was written as a spy for the nation of Latveria who usurps his government after gaining superpowers. That’s not 100% in line with his comic book counterpart, but it’s far closer than the final film, where he is just a bad-tempered scientist with ill-defined powers and motivation. But man, at some point, this incarnation of Doctor Doom actually had an evil castle. What could have been, right?

Since Fantastic Four has already achieved the status of “infamous disaster” less than a month after release, we can expect little details and anecdotes to trickle out for the foreseeable future. Everyone loves a mystery, especially when there’s a trainwreck at the center of it all.