Taking a break from complaining about the Spider-Man reboot

[seriousfic]

To complain about the Fantastic Four reboot. BEFORE YOU EVEN START, no, i don’t really have a problem with Michael B. Jordan playing Johnny Storm. It’s this whole thing where Fox is casting exclusively young (and assuredly cheap) actors to portray a superhero group that is famously a family unit. You can’t have a family that is entirely sexy teens! If you want to tell a story about sexy teens, you have the X-Men franchise, that’s seventy percent sexy teens. Just take this script, change the title to X-Men Academy, boom, you’re done. Get Ellen Page to play Professor Kitty Pryde. Mix and match the characters all you want. Between Young Mutants, Generation X, X Factor, Excalibur, X-Force, and I’m still probably forgetting a few, there’s plenty of mutants you could use that would fit any conceivable actor. If you could somehow find your way to recast Emma Frost and make her headmistress even, I’d make it worth your while *casually flashes twenty-dollar bill*

But that’s not what I’m talking about today. No, I’m going to talk about how, even for a Muppet Babies version of Fantastic Four canon, this casting is abysmal. It’s like an entire movie being put together to teach racists on the internet a lesson. “Okay, we’re going to make the one well-cast guy black, while everyone else is the same race they were in the comics, but completely wrong for their parts.” Let me just go through this.

Miles Teller, Kit Harrington, and Richard Madden are testing for Reed Richards. And c’mon, let’s be honest, Kit Harrington playing a super-genius is the male equivalent of Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist. Also, none of these people are in their forties. And you thought it was bad when the Jessica Alba version went “oh, he only has gray in his hair because of cosmic radiation, he’s still mostly young.”

Saoirse Ronan and Kate Mara are testing for Sue Storm. My mind really boggles when it comes to Sue Storm’s casting. It’s a bubbly, all-American girl in her thirties with blonde hair and girl-next-door looks. I’ve just described the lead of every rom-com movie released in the last twenty years, and yet last time they got Jessica Alba (which might almost have avoided being embarrassing if they hadn’t decided she should also have blonde hair and blue eyes, ending up looking like how the KKK would Photoshop a Hispanic woman before masturbating to her). To be fair, Kate Mara doesn’t sound so bad, and I will take Sue Storm suddenly being the eldest member of the ensemble (at the ripe old age of thirty) over her falling in love with Reed as a toddler, but Saoirse Ronan… any casting that makes me think “they couldn’t at least get Katherine Heigl?” IS BAD CASTING.

Comments

[tafkarfanfic.livejournal.com]

So far as Kit Harrington goes, I don't think he's the right fit for Reed Richards but I think the Denise Richards comparison is going a bit far! He actually sounds pretty intelligent in interviews. That having been said, I think that all of the casting for Reed Richards is about ten years too young.

Who would you cast? I understand your complaints but I'm not getting a sense for who your alternatives are.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I like Denise Richards.

I know it's cliched, but I think Benedict Cumberbatch would be a good Reed, with both intelligence and a sense of humor--certainly more fun than him playing an endless stream of icy British villains. Then get Dean Norris to play Ben Grimm and you're in business.

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

If they insist on going for the younger, sexier Reed Richards (and I still don't understand why; the most popular Marvel hero of the moment is played by a guy approaching fifty), Richard Madden strikes me as the best of those choices.

[commodore-zeke.livejournal.com]

Dean Norris. DEAN NORRIS. Of course. It's so perfect... they should have sent a poet...

(It would've been a much harder sell if I hadn't seen Michael Chiklis in the role, but he was one of the few real home runs in the Tim Story FF films.)