Early this morning, Jeff Sneider at TheWrap filed a story that Michael B. Jordan (best known as Wallace in The Wire) was “in contention” to play The Human Torch in Fox’s Fantastic Four Reboot. It’s hard to know what “in contention” or “being considered” even really mean as it relates to casting, but Fantastic Four is being directed by Josh Trank of Chronicle, which also starred Michael B. Jordan, whose star is sure to be on the rise after starring in the critically acclaimed festival darling Fruitvale (now Fruitvale Station), so I guess it would make sense. Sure, why not, he’s a good actor. Either way, in and of itself, this news item is still a few facts away from me giving a shit.

But of course, this wouldn’t make Kerfuffle Watch without a kerfuffle, or at least a fracas with a whiff of hubbubelry. OH MY GOD, A BLACK GUY MIGHT PLAY A WHITE CHARACTER! Just search “human torch black” on Twitter if you want to see some pissed off people. But I wouldn’t recommend it, because let’s be honest, if you go snooping around pond bottoms, you’re going to find scum. It’s not a surprise. The age old argument in play here is, “Wouldn’t black guys be pissed if a white guy was cast as a black character?!” Probably, but I don’t feel like playing make believe in order to predict whether people might be offended by something. They probably will. Someone, somewhere, will be. All things being equal, yeah, a white guy could play a black guy from a comic book and vice versa, and everyone would be fine with it. But all things aren’t quite equal yet, there’s still the memory of minstrel shows and black people being underrepresented and blah blah blah. Maybe some day it will be just as okay for a white dude to play a black dude as vice versa, but we’re not quite there yet. So in the meantime, maybe just shut up about it because who really cares anyway.

Let’s not forget, we’re talking about The Human Torch here, a character named “Johnny Storm,” who is literally flaming. The people worried that the character might be black don’t seem at all troubled by the fact that he’s super duper gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some of my best friends are gay superheros. Look, all I’m saying is, if a black guy playing The Human Torch is something that legitimately troubles you, I’m going to wedgie you with your own Klan robes, you tumbling, tumbling dickweed.

Photo Credit: Phil Stafford / Shutterstock.com / Marvel.com

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.

photo credit: lev radin / Shutterstock.com