Fox’s original Fantastic Four movies went along way towards creating the perception that led to that old adage “Fox is f*cking terrible and can’t do anything right.” But today’s Fox is a new Fox, with a track record of putting out actually decent superhero movies like Chronicle and X-Men: First Class. It’s (hopefully) that new Fox who’s rebooting Fantastic Four. They hired Josh Trank from Chronicle to direct and brought Matthew Vaughn of X-Men First Class on to produce, and so far so good. And now they’ve brought on Seth Grahame-Smith, of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter fame, to rewrite the script. So… Eh? Should we expect Fantastic Four and Wendigo (pictured)? Fantastic Four vs. The Duppy?

Author and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith has done polish screenwriting work on Fox’s reboot of Fantastic Four, which Josh Trank is directing.
Sources say that the new reboot is taking a grounded superhero and sci-fi approach to the heroes and will tap deep into the comics mythology, which featured not just the better-known villains such as Doctor Doom and Galactus but also alien races the Kree and the Skrull, and the anti-matter universe known as the Negative Zone.
Grahame-Smith is the best-selling author behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the latter of which was adapted by Fox last year. The multi-medium maven penned the script for the movie as well as the script for Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s take on the 1970s vampire soap opera. [THR]

I still don’t quite know what to think about Seth Grahame-Smith. His books seem like an incredibly tedious exercise in stretching out a throw-away joke, to the point that the tediousness of it becomes the joke. I can’t imagine needing to read more than 15 pages of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But if I’d had the idea for that throw-away joke, and someone wanted to pay me a bunch of money to stretch it to tedious lengths, I’d probably stretch stretch stretch until I was buying gold hoagies and diamond-encrusted foam cowboy hats too. Then there’s Dark Shadows, which was a train wreck only in the most generous sense of the phrase. Do we blame that on Grahame-Smith, on Tim Burton, or on the idea of making that a movie in the first place? I don’t know. All I know is that Seth Grahame-Smith’s formula of “take public domain work with name recognition, add element of kitschy fantasy” is every studio exec’s perfect boner dream. At this point, I’m not sure he can be stopped.

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