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

Not necessarily relevant, but still awesome.

If you all will indulge me, I have some page view whoring to do here on Vince’s pretty CSS style sheet…

There have been a variety of rumors regarding the direction that Fox would be taking the X-Men after the overwhelming success of X-Men: First Class rescued the franchise from the Cheetos-dusted fingers of Brett Ratner’s demise. For starters, we know that Patrick Stewart will be returning as Professor X in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and he also hinted that other actors will also reprise their roles from the original trilogy.

Obviously, we knew that Hugh Jackman is still Wolverine, because he was in First Class and he’s filming The Wolverine, and nobody else was born to play Wolverine like Jackman, but now we also know that P-Stew wasn’t lying because Famke Janssen has a cameo in The Wolverine. Additionally, by hiring Mark Millar to oversee all of its Marvel properties, Fox is working diligently to create an alliance not only between X-Men and Fantastic Four, but also possibly Marvel’s The Avengers, which would obviously be amazing.

So now the bad news – Matthew Vaughn is no longer directing Days of Future Past because he’s working on another film. I know, I’m bummed, too.

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Before X-Men: First Class came out, it

Fox has just closed a deal with Matthew Vaughn to come back and direct the sequel to X-Men: First Class, with Simon Kinberg writing the script and Bryan Singer back as producer. [Deadline]

The last one had Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz (Thor) and Jane Goldman and Vaughn (Kick-Ass) writing the script, while Simon Kinberg previously wrote the Ratner X-Men, Jumper, Sherlock Holmes, and that upcoming McG movie, This Means War, which makes him perhaps not the most promising-sounding candidate. But it’s super hero movie, so it’ll probably get six rewrites anyway. In any case, the good news is that Matthew Vaughn will be directing the next X-Men movie. The bad news is that Matthew Vaughn will be directing the next X-Men movie, and not something potentially more badass. It will also be interesting to see where they go with titles. I’m assuming the Rambo-esque “X-Men First Class Part 2″ will be the play here, but with all these reboots and origin stories and sequels of prequels of origin story reboots, these things are going to need footnotes before long. Rise of the Planet of the Apes Part 2 dash 1 to the power of Spider-Man. X-Man Up to Tha Streets.

Michael F. Assbender, assbending like a boss

X-Men: Born This Way

X-Men: First Class is about one obnoxious subplot away from being the movie Watchmen always wanted to be, the huge-budget, over-the-top superhero epic that has as much insight into the human condition as it does spandex and… grunting. Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn manages to turn a Muppet Babies concept with a disastrous marketing campaign (HURRR, DIAGONAL ORIGIN STORY!) into something a lot more ambitious than your basic retread of the superhero story. And that’s good, because X has as its source material a layered allegory for the Civil Rights movement, whereas, say, Thor was mostly an excuse to watch a buff guy hit sh*t with the hammer (though Brett Ratner still can’t tell the difference). Look, I was as surprised as you are.  DON’T FIGHT IT! YOU’VE BEEN ASSBENT!

X opens in flashback, telling two parallel backstories. One starring over-enunciating James McAvoy as smarmypants overichiever Charles Xavier; the other, ass-bending Michael F. Assbender (Michael Fassbender, to other people) as hard-knocks Polish concentration camp orphan Erik Lehnsherr. One part of this supposed origin story that’s never explained is Xavier’s British accent, which he already has at the age of 10 when we catch up with him at his palatial estate in, uh… Westchester, New York.  Did rich kids speak in British accents in the 40s?  Because JFK was a rich kid in the 40s and I’m pretty sure I heard him call a country “Cuber.”  In any case, rich Xavier is already a powerful psychic, while penniless Lehnsherr possesses mutant genes that make him far less Jewy than his parents.  Later he learns he can control metal when Kevin Bacon shoots his mother.  (That’s Kevin Bacon, Nazi Scientist, by the way, before he morphs into Kevin Bacon, international playboy — but I’m getting ahead of myself).  As Erik discovers during a mother-murdered-in-front-of-him induced rage, his ability to attract metal is directly related to the intensity of his emotions.  Why, if only he had one person on whom to pin all his most intense hatreds! And another who could literally enter his mind and help him sort out his feelings! Why, all that’d be left is some giant metal sh*t to control.

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Matthew Vaughn and 20th Century Fox’s X-Men: First Class opens in just a few weeks (June 4th, to be exact).  New clips from the film, once rumored to be a behind-schedule disaster, are now coming fast and furious (as I’ve been known to myself).  The latest centers on Hank McCoy, aka Beast, played by Nicholas Hoult, who shows off his mutations for the first time, to the instant pantie moistening of Mystique, played by the lovely Jennifer Lawrence.  Oh yeah, baby, you turned on by a man with toes on his feet?  What say we go somewhere more private and I show you the meaning of “prehensile.”