First Image Of Michael B Jordan As Johnny Storm In The Fantastic Four

At long last, the first official production image from 20th Century Fox’s upcoming ‘The Fantastic Four’ reboot has been released.

Collider got the scoop of the very first picture of Johnny Storm/Human Torch actor Michael B Jordan in costume, in an off-camera moment with screenwriter/producer Simon Kinberg - and as promised, the costume isn’t exactly the classic blue spandex that Marvel’s original super-team have been hitherto famed for.

So, what do we think of this new look?

Collider got another fairly major scoop along with this first image, as director Josh Trank - the target of the most online abuse from fans unhappy with his proposals for a radically different take on the Marvel comic, and also rumoured to have been at loggerheads with the studio over his vision - has finally broken his silence and discussed his work on the film at length, along with Kinberg.

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Acknowledging that they had “consciously decided to not release anything official” from ‘The Fantastic Four’ thus far, Trank explains this is because “we really want the audience to have the proper reaction to this material seeing it for the first time.  You’ve really got to put your best foot forward.  You can’t just leak an image to strike up a conversation.  You want people to see something that has thought behind it.  And the teaser [rumoured to be popping up online soon] should do just that.”  

Regarding his previous silence on the controversy surrounding the film, the director says, “there are moments when I look and think, “ah what are they saying?  I should say something!” But no, because it will just be so much better to see how everyone reacts to the material.  I don’t want to speak for the material, I want the material to speak for itself.  Not necessarily defend itself though, I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. 

"I’m so proud of this movie and I’m so excited for people to see it, and I just know that it’s so much more fulfilling to see how the same people who are saying things right now change their tune as soon as they have something to look at and dissect."

Recent rumours have suggested the film will be very close in tone to Trank’s breakthrough movie, 2012’s found footage movie ‘Chronicle,’ which approached the notion of teenagers getting superpowers in a far darker and more realistic fashion than is the norm - and Trank seems to confirm that ‘The Fantastic Four’ will follow a similar path, suggesting that genre-wise it would fit more with “science-fiction, or horror, or even drama” than the current superhero genre.

“I would say that the science fiction of it is a big thing that sets it apart from most of the other superhero genre films.  I’m a huge David Cronenberg fan, and I always viewed Fantastic Four and the kind of weirdness that happens to these characters and how they’re transformed to really fall in line more with a Cronenberg-ian science fiction tale of something horrible happening to your body and [it] transforming out of control.”

Read the full interview at Collider.

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Picture Credit: Collider/20th Century Fox