Dude, hit the reset button.

I was excited to hear that Fox is looking to reboot The Fantastic 4, because it neatly reaffirms everything that I imagine I know about the film industry. And that boils down to this: when something works, fucking do it all the time!

I hate to blame people that have good ideas and execute them well, but this is Christopher Nolan’s fault. He knocked it out of the park on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight – because he had a good idea. Because he made sure that a solid, coherent script got written for each movie. Because he stocked his films with competent-to-fantastic actors. Because he orchestrated events around what served the story. Because he made good goddamn movies.

But, sadly, the industry doesn’t see that – they see that they took a franchise and rebooted it, made it more serious and quasi-realistic, and more importantly than anything else, made it “darker,” and “grittier.” And that’s all that they’ll do here. They’ll skip story, and character, and plot that anyone will actually give a shit about, and instead as a means to get at those aforementioned cool buzzwords they’ll just, I dunno, shorten the film’s title so that it somehow seems more badass. Instead of The Fantastic Four, it’ll just be THE FOUR. Because fuck Fantastic, that corny shit’s for retards! THEY DON’T NEED FANTASTIC, THEY’RE JUST THE FOUR.

And they’ll all wear leather jackets and have five o’clock shadows and maybe occasional substance abuse issues, and from time to time they’ll stare off into the middle distance and that will be the point that you’ll know, sitting in the theater, that these characters are tortured and gritty and real and fuck you, we rebooted it!