Posts
 |
| Pable Pascal as Mr. Fantastic |
The new Fantastic Four movie is dying at the box office. It is a bit of a mystery.
Some say it is because of “superhero fatigue.” People have had enough of superhero movies; the excitement has worn off.
But this does not tally: the first weekend, the Fantastic Four receipts were good. People wanted to see a superhero movie. There must have been some problem with this particular superhero movie, which turned those initial audiences off.
According to most critics, the movie was a decent production: good acting, good plot. If we can trust them, the problem was not quality.
That leaves wokeness. Although the movie was not aggressively woke, Pablo Pascal did not look like the Reed Richards of the comic book. He was presumably cast because he was Latino: current Oscar rules require DEI casting to qualify for an award. And they sex-changed the Silver Surfer.
I think the cultural climate has changed fast enough that the audiences are no longer willing to sit down for this nonsense even on a moderate level.
Why would they? The appeal of watching a live-action superhero movie is in seeing the familiar comic book characters come to life. You want them to be as close as possible to those you cherish in your memory. This was a big problem with the earlier Fantastic Four films—they could not get The Thing looking right. This one succeeds, then throws it all away by getting Reed Richards and the Silver Surfer wrong.
The same thing, of course, applies to race-swapping and sex-swapping in live-action remakes of the classic fairy tales. The principle is so simple, and so simple to understand, and yet they keep deliberately getting it wrong. This shows contempt for the original creation, like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. By extension, it shows contempt for the audience, the fan base.
What did they think would happen?
