‘Fantastic Four’ bombs with $26.2M debut, ‘Mission: Impossible’ again tops box

I walked out of the theater realizing the movie was a complete mess. But this weekend we have a completely opposite scenario.

It was a crowded weekend at the multiplexes with four new wide releases piling into theaters. This is also a classic “rank doesn’t matter” weekend. It allowed Tom Cruise and “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” take its second weekend box office crown with $29.4 million. I would say a character-lease deal like Sony’s doing with Spider-Man would seem like a good opportunity, but Fox and Marvel hate each other, so loaning the Fantastic Four for another reboot or to be re-purposed by Kevin Feige seems unlikely. Fox can not surely take a third crack at Fantastic Four.

The family-focused animated comedy “Shaun the Sheep Movie” from Lionsgate also opened this week, earning $4M at the domestic box-office to take 11th place overall.

The film’s opening weekend crowd was 60% male and 51% under the age of 25.

Given some weak wide-opening competition (more about that in a moment), Ethan Hunt and the rest of the International Monetary Fund team can now count more than $108.6 million in their domestic coffers, with the worldwide haul standing at $173.6 million.

Or does the blame lie somewhere in the Saga of Josh Trank, the director of the inspired and small found-footage film “Chronicle” (which his collaborator Max Landis has called a “fluke”).

With uncertainty about who should star (the studio wanted more famous actors, but Trank won that battle) and studio hemming and hawing on approvals for the final script, it stalled crew workers who were trying to build sets, make costumes, props, and prep the movie. Heck, this new film may sell fewer tickets overall than either of those films sold on their opening weekends alone. Two, if Fox loses their rights to Marvel and Disney, we get Dr. Doom, Galactus, and the Skrulls in the next Avengers movie.

Here’s Trank’s tweet that many screen grabbed for prosperity. The break-even point is at approximately $15 million, making it a low-risk investment.

Now here we are twenty years later and Marvel has canceled the Fantastic Four comic, their once flagship title, and, allegedly, will not create new characters or further Fantastic Four adventures in order to spite the movie studio that is producing a lousy product just to retain licensing rights to the property. The film hasn’t faired much better with audiences, with a 2.5 user score on Metacritic. That’s a bad result but not a studio killer or anything.

The success of “Jurassic World” and the failures of “Terminator: Genisys” and “Fantastic Four” should make studios reconsider their approach to rebooting franchises that have grown stale. Even the goofy Fantastic Four movies from the mid-2000s touched on this aspect because it is an important factor of the team. But those dreams were dashed by the critically-roasted and now commercially ignored movie we have before us. “A discussion rumored to be taking place is the consideration of removing “Fantastic Four 2” from its June 9, 2017 release date and eventually plugging ‘Deadpool 2″ into that spot.

The original debuted to $56.1 million in 2005, and Rise of the Silver Surfer opened to $58.1 million in 2007.

As for Fox’s second attempt at The Fantastic Four, it was less “flame on!” and more flame out. The studio is hoping for legs with “Rickie” as older audiences do have the need to see a film in its first weekend.

While I don’t think the Fantastic Four are unadaptable as characters, at this point I believe they may be unadaptable by Fox.