An oral history of Roger Corman’s unreleased Fantastic Four movie

“It’s like a miracle… One million dollars cash to us if we star in a movie,” Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic, says with a no-nonsense look on his stretchable rubber face.

His three blue-costumed team members are enthusiastic upon hearing this news. To quote Susan Storm, the “Invisible Woman” and Reed’s girlfriend-turned-wife, “The million dollars we receive will pay all our bills and give us a fresh start.” Reed’s superpowered peers like the rock-skinned brute the Thing (Ben Grimm) and the fiery Human Torch (Johnny Storm) nod in agreement.

These are scenes from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #9 (1962), a comic book that screenwriter Craig Nevius fondly cut out and collected back in the day. As fate would have it, Nevius would grow up to write the million-dollar movie The Fantastic Four (let’s call it F4 ’94 from now on). But while the 1962 comic later depicted the team celebrating their blockbuster cinematic debut, the real movie never saw the light of day.

Act 1: Extraordinary heroes, ordinary budget

In 1986, late German producer Bernd Eichinger of Constantin Film purchased the rights to the Fantastic Four from Marvel Comics. The contract was set to expire on December 31, 1992, and he needed to produce a film featuring the characters to retain the rights. As the deadline approached, he had made no progress with the movie he envisioned. Eichinger’s last resort to kickstart production in 1992 was to ring up B-movie mogul and low-budget indie auteur Roger Corman.

Corman planned out a $1 million budget and picked Oley Sassone to direct the film. Sassone’s previous credits at the time included music videos like Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” and the Corman-produced Bloodfist III: Forced To Fight. It didn’t take much to convince Sassone; he adored the Fantastic Four as a child.

“As a kid, I liked Superman but I could never identify with superheroes from other planets,” Sassone tells The A.V. Club over a video call. But the Fantastic Four “…were normal human beings who got exposed to something that turned them into extraordinary heroes.”

When it came to hiring a scribe, Corman recommended Nevius but he still needed Eichinger’s approval. “I took out my old Fantastic Four dolls and said, ‘This is why I’m the screenwriter for your movie: I’ve been making up stories about these guys my whole life!’” Nevius was offered the job later that day. He based his script on an original treatment by Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee.

The cast included Alex Hyde-White as Fantastic Four leader Reed Richards, Rebecca Staab as Sue Storm, Jay Underwood as Johnny Storm, Michael Bailey Smith as Ben Grimm (the rock-hard version was played by stuntman Carl Ciarfalio), and Joseph Culp as the villainous Doctor Victor Von Doom. Hyde-White was a Hollywood veteran, but the rest of the cast were still up-and-comers. “We weren’t big movie stars, but we were just very committed and well-cast actors. And you really see it in the film,” Culp says. Case in point: when Culp’s voice got muffled under Doctor Doom’s mask, he compensated by dramatically moving his hands to give Doom a majestic, almost Shakespearean presence. Culp says Sassone asked him to play the character like Mussolini. “Our Doctor Doom resembles closely what we see in the comic, which is that he is an epic, tyrant villain with operatic delivery.”

Filming lasted for 21 days from late December 1992 to mid-January 1993. That’s a tight timeline for any film, let alone a superhero flick. But Nevius’ script was abundant with dialogue-driven moments that explored the human side of Marvel’s costumed quartet, which helped keep costs down but also lent the film a more grounded, realistic feeling. All the big effects work, including the Human Torch’s “Flame On” moment of head-to-toe combustion, was left for the film’s third act. That’s when the financial constraints really start to show: the flaming hero is rendered in 3D graphics as he deflects Doctor Doom’s city-destroying laser shot and hurls it into outer space. Lee’s suggestion of a Silver Surfer tease (what could have been Marvel’s first post-credits scene) was also scrapped to save up on the VFX budget.

Despite the constraints, Sassone had a very specific vision for the film. His eyes light up as he talks about a scene from David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, the one in which John Hurt’s disfigured protagonist gets chased down by a violent mob only to break down and yell, “I’m not an animal. I’m a human being!” Sassone couldn’t pay a crowd of extras to recreate this scene as an homage, but at one point in F4 ’94, the Thing runs in the streets at night to rediscover his humanity. Passersby look upon him with judgment and scared glances but he’s in no mood for violence, or “clobberin’ time,” as he calls it. Instead, he just wants to be loved and accepted despite his tough exterior. “The Thing is this super-strong guy and he’s just playing it like a kitten,” Sassone says of Ciarfalio’s tender physical mannerisms.

The Thing’s vulnerability is all the more evident with an emotion-changing animatronic head that went along with the rubber suit. That head, which still exists to this day, was a significant investment. “Trying to do a movie for just a million dollars itself is ridiculous, forget doing a one million movie with special effects,” Staab says.

Brothers David and Eric Wurst put together the score with the help of a 48-piece orchestra and $6,000 from their own pockets. Fox set a release date of May 31, 1994. A trailer ran in theaters. Hyde-White and Bailey Smith hopped from one comic book convention to the next for a publicity tour. A world premiere for F4 ’94 was also planned at the Mall of America in Minnesota on January 19. “I think the Mayor or somebody in the town said that we’re going to declare it Fantastic Four day! It was a big deal,” Sassone adds.

But shortly before the premiere, the film was scrapped, pulled from the release schedule with no explanation given. It was never rescheduled and, to this day, it remains officially unreleased.

Act 2: The bastard child of Marvel

Legend has it that F4 ’94 was never meant to be released, that it was just an excuse to help Bernd Eichinger retain his film rights for the characters. After all, Eichinger did produce the 20th Century Fox Fantastic Four movies in the 2000s.

“I never would have accepted the offer to write the screenplay if I had any clue that the movie was being made to take advantage of a legal loophole,” Nevius says. After the film was scrapped, he was so embarrassed that he scratched out F4 ’94 from his resume for some time. But as is evident from the trailers and promotion campaigns, F4 ’94 was always meant to get a release. There’s a long-running rumor that Eichinger pulled the plug at the last moment hoping for a bigger studio to pay him for a more expensive Fantastic Four movie.

Whatever happened behind the scenes, one thing is clear. The film is undoubtedly campy and doesn’t boast cutting-edge effects but its cancellation wasn’t rooted in low quality; it was a result of business and legal decisions from the higher-ups. As Sassone puts it, “Gotta remember man, it’s called the movie business. It’s not called movie art.”

As for Roger Corman, he was as shocked as the cast and crew. It was the only unreleased production of his much-storied career. While Corman was compensated with $1 million, the film’s print changed hands from his to Eichinger’s and later ended up in the lap of Avi Arad. The ex-Marvel Entertainment head honcho infamously claimed to have burnt the last remaining print of the movie. Pop culture theorists suggest that Arad was embarrassed for Marvel to be associated with a low-budget feature, fearing that it would affect the comic book giant’s box-office odds.

“They treat the movie like a bastard child. It’s like we don’t want to let anybody know that we have this kid over here. They just ignore us,” Sassone laments.

Act 3: The cult favorite and the petition

The pre-release cancelation didn’t stop audiences from watching F4 ’94 through other sources. One leak led to a VHS taping and then that got bootlegged onto another VHS tape and another, until the 2000s were booming with recordings of the movie being sold on eBay like rare pop-culture artifacts.

“Oh my god, they did an amazing job of cleaning up the picture. Now you see, this is really what the movie was supposed to look like,” Sassone observes about a crispier AI-rendered remaster that was recently uploaded on YouTube. F4 ’94 has turned it into an unlikely cult phenomenon, and that’s why Culp is asking for recognition now. In March 2024, Culp started a public petition urging a now-Disney-owned Marvel to officially release the movie, or at the very least, acknowledge its existence.

Culp’s petition has garnered 3,000 signatures (and counting), but Hyde-White holds a different view. It’s only apt for the actors playing Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom to have polar opposite ideologies (although the actors continue to share off-screen camaraderie). For Hyde-White, the movie is a “sleeping dog” rather than a cursed child.

“It’s a nice sleeping dog. It’s still alive, and I’m happy to let it lay where it lays.” The Battlestar Galactica and Pretty Woman actor says. “I think the reason it keeps getting better and better is because it’s never been released. Do the math. Once it’s released, the story ends. Then it becomes the early version of Fantastic Four that now people have judgment about. Our Fantastic Four is a happy accident.”

But for Culp, the hope for Kevin Feige’s legal-corporate wizardry in resurrecting the film still remains. The actor who also doubles as a writer and director, feels that F4 ’94 needs a new life and not just “cult-y status as an unreleased film.”

“And that would be one of the greatest marketing things that Marvel can do for the new Fantastic Four. You know, it would be like, release the old one, have you seen the old one? You can get it on streaming now!”

Act 4: Maybe the real movie was the friends we made

For a movie that entertains fans only through bootlegged copies and unofficial uploads, Staab and her co-stars don’t have any regrets about what went down in 1994. For one thing, they continue to be good friends. “I’m getting married on April 28th and Alex [Hyde-White] is coming. It’s going to be a big party!” Bailey Smith says via email.

“Ours is a real buddy movie. Ours is probably the only Fantastic Four movie that really goes to the skeleton, showing these regular people who became superheroes,” Staab adds.

Reminiscing upon the legacy of the unreleased project and the resulting bonds that formed, Staab says, “I’ve never worked on anything in my life where I’m still in touch with the other actors. I won’t say The Fantastic Four was exactly a blessing in disguise, but at the time when we thought it was all over, it was ironically really the beginning.”