With the most recent Fantastic Four picture shaping up as one of the all-time superhero bombs, I’ve been thinking about how I’d reboot the franchise, were I suddenly granted power over time, space, and dimension (or at least a Hollywood studio!). Drawing upon the elements I outlined in my Core of the Four blog post, and fortified by a re-read of the original Stan Lee and Jack Kirby run of the Fantastic Four, I’ve cooked up a scheme that’s just crazy enough to work! Fear not, Fantastic Fans — we may have hit bottom, but that only means there’s nowhere to go but up!

Just for fun, here’s how I’d re-re-re-introduce the Fantastic Four to today’s film audiences!

(This particular bit of fanboy fantasizing assumes that the Fantastic Four reverts to Marvel Studios from Fox.)

First, I’d introduce the characters as a subplot in an already-scheduled Marvel movie. Take any upcoming Marvel film that might plausibly have a scene set in outer space — Avengers 3 or 4, Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, or maybe the Inhumans. Somewhere in the Solar System, our film heroes discover an old space capsule …

… Incredibly, it’s the Baxter-1, a privately-funded spacecraft that blasted off for space in 1961! Contact with the craft was lost shortly after launch, and she — and her crew of four intrepid adventurers — were thought lost forever!

Discovery of the Baxter-1 is a worldwide sensation … it’s like Amelia Earhart has been found! Even more sensationalistic is that the crew is alive, in a state of suspended animation! And what a crew they are …

Super-genius Reed Richards (Jon Hamm), a celebrity-scientist that shared the stage with Albert Einstein and popularized science for a generation of impressionable school kids!

Susan Storm (Emma Watson), America’s sweetheart, cover-girl for innumerable glamour magazines, spokeswoman for a score of progressive international charities, best friends with both Jackie Onassis AND Marilyn Monroe!

Johnny Storm (Josh Hutcherson), the original teen heart-throb … he was bigger than Elvis when he went into space, and his disappearance haunted a generation more than the death of James Dean!

Ben Grimm (Michael Shannon), ace pilot, who flew wingtip-to-wingtip with Chuck Yeager and was fast-tracked for the Gemini Space Program before he gambled his career on Reed Richard’s experimental wildcat space launch!

Suddenly, after more than half a century, these Fantastic Four are back … and they haven’t aged a day. All they can remember is launching into space, being knocked off course by a strange bombardment of cosmic rays, and then … nothing, until they are recovered in the present day.

The four instantly become the biggest celebrities on the planet … and the story really explodes when they manifest strange super-powers!

Fans of course can fill in the rest … and the stage is set for the Fantastic Four to headline another blockbuster film, but THIS time they’ll be free to actually be the Fantastic Four!

What I like about this idea is that it inserts the Fantastic Four into the contemporary Marvel Universe while retaining much of the charm of the original comics. Our heroes get to be celebrities — which is critical to the FF experience — in a way only this kind of return-from-the-past story can permit in a Marvel Cinematic Universe that already has an Avengers full of heroes that largely have public identities. With Reed, Ben, Johnny, and Sue hailing from 1961, the movie can enjoy some of the man out of time/fish out of water humor and humanity that worked so well in Marvel’s Captain America and Thor pictures. And by being the very same personalities that we remember from the comics — personalities very much part and parcel of the early 1960s — our heroes can retain the optimism, heroism, spirit of adventure, and very deep flaws inherent in their original conception.

For our enemy, of course, there is only one choice — Doctor Doom (Ian McShane … who would also make a great Mole Man)!

But this time Doom isn’t an internet rage case or some guy with a skin condition or whatever dumbass nonsense Hollywood has foisted upon Doctor Doom in his past screen appearances. Nope, he’s Doctor Freaking Doom, the reclusive and terrifying dictator of the rogue state of Latveria, a frightening nuclear power every bit as mysterious and unpredictable as North Korea.

(and yes, Doom is lonely, too!)

Doom has ruled Latveria with an iron hand for over half a century … no one has seen the face beneath Doom’s mask, which must be impossibly ancient by now (unless the dark rumors that Doom has used bizarre science and dark sorcery to retain his youth are to be believed). The return of the Fantastic Four puts Doctor Doom back in the limelight, resurrecting long-dormant conspiracy theories about a secret link between Doom and Reed Richards, that Doom might somehow have been involved in Reed’s mysterious space project, and may even have been responsible for its failure.

And so our Marvel Cinematic Universe is immeasurably enriched by reinstating the Fantastic Four as Marvel’s First Family, with their greatest foe ready to battle them — immediately a part of the larger story but also reasonably partitioned off into their own unique story, coming to terms with their superpowers and with a world that has advanced by immeasurable leaps and bounds in the subjective hours that they have been away.

Our heroes have plenty of external threats to battle — Doctor Doom! Mole Man! Galactus! But more importantly, they have key internal threats to wrestle with, too …

How does Reed Richards’ genius translate to this brave new world, where his “cutting edge” inventions are bulky and outdated next to the cell phones carried by school kids? Can the old dog learn new tricks?

How will the fame-hungry Johnny Storm cope in a world that has moved past wholesome teen pop idols in favor of reality TV stars and YouTube celebrities? Can the teen idol reinvent himself for a new generation?

How will Sue Storm evolve as a person in a world that expects women will do more than wear designer gowns and smile sweetly for the camera? Can America’s Sweetheart overcome her insecurities and prejudices to master the opportunities that would never have been open to her in the era of her birth?

How does Ben Grimm fit into the world now that he is a rock-skinned monster, no longer qualified for a space program that has lost its vision and sense of generational imperative? Can an aviation hero from the Cold War adopt to a new era where black and white have been replaced by shades of grey?

I don’t know about you … but I’d be first in line to see a Marvel Studios movie about that Fantastic Four. Heck, I’d even shell out for a 3D showing!

What do you think? Would you green light yet another Fantastic Four movie based on this take, or has the FF become so toxic that a John Carter reboot looks like a better idea by comparison? Sound off, True Believers, in the comments section, below!