Movies With Butter

Apparently, no one told the critics that there’s a review embargo on “Fantastic Four” until it opens this Friday. On Rotten Tomatoes, over twenty critics have ignored the embargo so far. And the early word is terrible. At 12% -- and it’s still early -- it’s even worse than the poorly received originals.

In general, early scores on Rotten Tomatoes tend to be more positive than negative, so it’s gonna be ugly by the time the Fox film opens this Friday. There’s a possibility that this might hit single digits on the reviews aggregator. Fox knows this already. So does Miles Teller, who told BBC (via HitFix): "Rarely are films of this size critically well-received... This is not a movie we're going to go on... Rotten Tomatoes, and it's going to be at 80 or 90 per cent." That’s why the studio is pushing a strict embargo (which a lot of critics have obviously ignored). Alas, the behind-the-scenes issues and subsequent reshoots didn’t help.

The early reaction seems to be that there’s too much buildup and not enough action from the quartet of superheroes. That’s the problem with rebooting a franchise too soon when the origin story is still fresh in people's minds. Apparently, this newer version over-does this by wasting two thirds of the running time on a story most people already know. All of that would have been forgiven if the last third delivers, but unfortunately, most critics don’t think it does.

Fox was planning on sequels, but that looks unlikely now unless it miraculously does gangbusters at the box office (after watching the film last night, that’s not gonna happen).

“Fantastic Four” is written and directed by “Chronicle’s” Josh Trank and stars Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, and Toby Kebbell.

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