Feeling bullish on the eve of the release of its "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer," Fox has already put a feature spinoff into development that will star the enigmatic Surfer, with J. Michael Straczynski currently crafting the screenplay.
Despite lackluster reviews, the first "Fantastic Four" raked in $329 million worldwide, apparently a result of its appeal to younger viewers. So the sequel, which opens Friday with a story by John Turman and Mark Frost and a screenplay by Frost and "Simpsons" writer Don Payne, has skewed its tone even softer. This has resulted in a PG rating, which has provoked a disgusted outcry from fans online who churlishly point out that even Harry Potter is now too gritty for 11-year-olds.
They may have a point, given that this film ostensibly features a Christ-like harbinger of doom like the Surfer and Galactus, a God-like destroyer of worlds whose rep may be a little inflated. Reports from the project's development indicate that the producers kept trying to purge Galactus entirely from early versions of the screenplay.
Well, perhaps the studio has heard the negative static, since it apparently hopes to spin the new Surfer franchise in a darker direction to attract the slightly older demographic of its X-Men films. If so, Straczynski, whose original screenplay "The Changeling" is on director Clint Eastwood's slate, is a logical pick for the Surfer story line.
A longtime writer of television science fiction on "The Twilight Zone" and "Babylon 5," Straczynski has also spent much of the last few years writing for Marvel Comics on properties like "Amazing Spider-Man" and "Thor" (also in development with a Mark Protosevich screenplay and "Layer Cake's" Matthew Vaughn reportedly negotiating to direct). Straczynski recently penned 15 issues of Fantastic Four for Marvel, and the first issue of his "Silver Surfer: Requiem" series just published last month, with three more in the works.
Seems like Straczynski's on the rise too.
Hey, WGA: Is reality overrated?
Thursday night, the Writers Guild hosted another of its semiannual screenwriter receptions, this time in honor of its summer movie scribes, who assembled at the swank Viceroy hotel in Santa Monica. Amid the good-natured back-patting, industry small talk and passable hors d'oeuvres was at least one in-depth conversation about the upcoming contract negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP) that highlighted a fissure in the membership's solidarity.
