C\u2019mon, let this man suit up as a comic book villain!<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were a lot of things that ultimately ended up hitting the cutting room floor,\u201d Shakman told Variety. \u201cWhen we were building a \u201960s retro-future world, introducing all of these villains, introducing these four main characters as a group, as well as individually, introducing the idea of a child \u2014 there was a lot of stuff to balance in this movie and some things had to go ultimately in terms of shaping the film for its final version.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shakman, who previously worked with Malkovich in his directorial debut, the thriller Cut Bank<\/a>, cast the actor as Red Ghost, a C-tier Marvel villain. Readers of the first issues of Fantastic Four will remember that Red Ghost hoped to conquer the moon with his gang of hyper-intelligent apes, who he zapped with the same cosmic rays that granted the F4 with powers. According to Variety\u2019s report, Red Ghost would have appeared battling the Fantastic Four in a cold open, which we no longer see and is absolutely terrible news, because look at how perfect this was.<\/p>\n Malkovich can\u2019t catch a break in the comic-book movie business. Back in 2010, before Sony and Marvel pivoted to producing The Amazing Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker and Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) in the director\u2019s chair, the two companies were set on continuing with Sam Raimi\u2019s mega-successful Spider-Man franchise. While Spider-Man 3 didn\u2019t earn the raves<\/a> of the near-masterpiece that was Spider-Man 2<\/a>, there was general optimism that Raimi and star Tobey Maguire could keep delivering. But as the story goes, Raimi really wanted to cast Malkovich as Vulture, aka bald criminal Adrian Toomes, while Sony wanted Anne Hathaway to play Black Cat as the movie\u2019s central villain, for youth appeal.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a damn shame it all fell apart, because look at how perfect that could have been.<\/p>\n Or maybe it\u2019s time for Malkovich to move on. We\u2019ll likely see his turn as Red Ghost in deleted scenes from Fantastic Four: First Steps. (Unless there are weird legal\/compensation issues involved with releasing those clips, in which case we will never see his turn as Red Ghost in deleted scenes from Fantastic Four: First Steps.) Maybe Marvel could pay him back with a strange what-if cameo, courtesy of a future multiversal romp. But after getting burned twice, I won\u2019t blame Malkovich for turning his back on the MCU. Marvel, you\u2019ve done our boy dirty. Unless you want to cast him as the voice of Beta Ray Bill or something, in which case we\u2019re all in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"C\u2019mon, let this man suit up as a comic book villain! \u201cThere were a lot of things that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3985,3943,12,6960,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-267698","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-marvel","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-sci-fi","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114865247628687178","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}