The Fantastic Four (found unreleased Marvel superhero film; 1994)

Official poster used for promotion.

Status: Found

Date found: Unknown

Found by: Unknown

The Fantastic Four is an unreleased low-budget feature film completed in 1994. It was produced by Roger Corman (famous for his low-budget productions) and Bernd Eichinger (who also produced another Fantastic Four movie in 2005 and its 2007 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). The film was based on the popular comic book series of the same name by Marvel Comics and featured the origin of the Fantastic Four and their first battle with the evil Doctor Doom and a mysterious Mole Man-like creature.

Production

Production began on December 28th, 1992, under music video director Oley Sassone.^[1] Storyboards were drawn by artist Pete Von Sholly. The 25-day production was shot on the Concorde Pictures soundstage in Venice, California, as well as in Agoura, California for a spacecraft crash scene, the Loyola Marymount campus for a lab explosion scene, and the former Pacific Stock Exchange building in downtown Los Angeles for team meeting scenes.

Release Plans and Cancellation

A 1993 magazine article gave a tentative release date of Labor Day weekend 1993. That summer, trailers ran in theatres and on the VHS tapes of the movie Carnosaur. Cast members promoted the film at a clips-screening at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and at the San Diego Comic-Con International. By this time, the world premiere was announced to take place at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 19th, 1994, with proceeds from the event earmarked for the charities Ronald McDonald House and the Children's Miracle Network.

Producer Bernd Eichinger later announced that the film would not be released. Following the announcement of the cancellation of the film's release, a rumor spread that the studio intended this version of the Fantastic Four to be the film equivalent of an ashcan copy: they had the legal rights to create a film based on the Fantastic Four, but they were not ready to produce a big-budget film. However, they needed to produce something or else they would lose the legal right to the characters. Apparently, the studio misled everyone involved in the making of the film by letting them believe it was going to be a genuine release rather than a way to maintain their license on the property. Producer Roger Corman has since confirmed that this was indeed the case.

Availability

The Israeli-American film producer, 'Arad Avi' claimed he 'burned' the original celluloid for the film after purchasing it. While his purchase is not disputed, the cast and crew of the film think he is exaggerating and the original 35mm film may be in a corporate warehouse somewhere.

It is hypothesized the film was initially copied via telecine a few days before a private screening, which produced the many subsequent VHS bootlegs which circulated before 2004.

A VHS-copy transfer was eventually uploaded to MySpleen and has since been mirrored to other video-sharing websites such as YouTube and Dailymotion.

A documentary about the 1994 Fantastic Four called Doomed was released in 2015. It sheds more light into where the all the bootlegs probably came from. The director of the film states he thinks all bootlegs originated from a rogue employee at a facility that was creating dubs for his own personal use. The people who produced the documentary called Doomed later released what they claim is a digital transfer of the original 3/4" U-matic dub which all bootlegs originated from. If this is true, this is the best quality, unaltered footage that will ever exist of the film, unless an official release happens.

Ever since the film was leaked to the internet, it has achieved a cult following.^[2]