There’s an onscreen redemption in The Fantastic Four: First Steps that, like the character of Sue Storm, derives its power from being partly invisible.
It’s a series of cameos from Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underwood and Michael Bailey Smith—the stars of another Fantastic Four movie filmed three decades ago. If their performances as Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and The Thing’s human alter ego, Ben Grimm, don’t ring a bell, there’s good reason: Their Fantastic Four film never saw the light of day.
Legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman whipped the production together for about $1 million in the last days of 1992, all so that one of his producer friends could meet a contractual deadline that would allow him to hang onto rights that were set to expire on December 31, 1992. Most working actors are used to making TV pilots that never air, or having supporting parts trimmed away in the edit bay. But the Fantastic Four cast was never let in on the real motivations behind their movie. They thought they were making a low-budget but playful comic book movie—and were heartsick when it turned out to be kind of a scheme.
More than 30 years later, the quartet reunited for small roles in the epic-scale First Steps. Hyde-White and Staab appear as TV journalists who chronicle the achievements of the Fantastic Four team. Underwood and Smith play workers at a power plant saved by the Human Torch. All four also appear in a newsreel of people thanking the heroes for the numerous times they’ve saved the city.
They also appeared in-person this week at the movie’s Los Angeles premiere, triggering an outpouring of affection from those who knew their story—and a wave of curiosity from the many who didn’t.
“I do, actually, believe in karma. Very rarely do you get a chance to wait 30 years to test that theory,” Hyde-White says the day after the premiere. Until now, they were contractually obligated to keep their involvement in the new film secret. Most didn’t even tell their families, close friends, or other costars from the old movie, fearing that a leak might lead them to be cut again.
“In this business, you know, anything can happen—and anything can not happen,” says Staab. “Malkovich got cut out of the movie, for crying out loud!” (It happens to the best of them: John Malkovich’s role as the villainous Red Ghost actually was trimmed from First Steps.)
All four original stars tell Vanity Fair that being embraced by Marvel Studios helps heal a 30-year-old betrayal, compounded by years of additional insult as their unseen movie was dissed and mocked. Some of the jokes about their film are certainly deserved; the actors themselves admit that the 1994 version of Fantastic Four was made on the cheap. “This is not really a movie that you’re supposed to laugh at,” says Smith. “But I agree…. There are some funny bits.”
The seeds of their return in The Fantastic Four: First Steps were sewn when the makers of the new movie began passing around the “lost” film. Eric Pearson, a Marvel Studios veteran who worked on the screenplays for Thor: Ragnarok and Thunderbolts*, among others, said he was sent a copy when he joined the team on First Steps. “It felt like watching a church play,” Pearson says. “Like they only had Sundays to rehearse.”
Over the decades, leaked copies of the scuttled superhero project gradually drew a cult fan base like those devoted to 1957’s Plan 9 From Outer Space or the 1990 indie debacle Troll 2. Those films have been celebrated as so-bad-they’re-good classics—and further immortalized in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood and the 2009 documentary Best Worst Movie. But The Fantastic Four never got to bask in the same kind of backhanded appreciation. Even now, it exists only as a bootleg, traded at sci-fi conventions or briefly appearing on YouTube every so often before inevitably being taken down.
It was just the first in a litany of misfires that have plagued the would-be Fantastic Four franchise. 20th Century Fox released two films in the mid-2000s starring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, and Michael Chiklis that were savaged by critics. A 2015 reboot with Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jaime Bell was an even bigger face-plant and box office flop, disowned by director Josh Trank amid creative disputes with Fox that overflowed into public denunciations and finger-pointing. (Trank declined to comment when reached by Vanity Fair, but said he sincerely wished First Steps goodwill and success.)
Joseph Culp, who played villainous Dr. Doom in the Roger Corman Fantastic Four, has a half-joking theory for why none of those movies worked: “It’s the curse of The Fantastic Four, because they have not paid proper homage to the original,” says Underwood
Is First Steps enough to lift the spell? “I think the curse is broken,” he answers. “I hope this movie just goes through the roof.”
Long before Marvel Studios took its current shape in the late 2000s, Bernd Eichinger—producer of 1984’s The NeverEnding Story and 1986’s The Name of the Rose—licensed The Fantastic Four in the hopes of bringing the superhero team to the big screen. Christopher Reeve’s Superman movies had been hits in the late ’70s and ’80s; Burton’s 1988 Batman revived interest in cape-wearing do-gooders. Still, there was a problem: Making a good live-action comic book movie required technology that either didn’t exist yet, or was prohibitively expensive. After several years had passed, Eichinger realized he had sat on the license for too long. It was about to expire and revert back to Marvel.
That’s when he asked Corman, the undisputed mastermind behind scores of low-budget hits, to rescue him. “That was his currency in the industry. He was a really good producer who was thrifty,” says Chris Nashawaty, author of Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie. “He could make a million dollars look like $10 million, and he’d been doing that since the ’50s.”
The ’94 Fantastic Four may have been made with cynical intent by Eichinger, who died in 2011. But a sincere effort was put forth by the actors, writers, and director Oley Sassone, a veteran of ’80s music videos for Natalie Cole, Eric Clapton, and Gloria Estefan. “We all rolled the dice thinking the game was fair, but it was rigged,” Sassone said in the 2015 documentary Doomed!, about the making of the ill-fated production. “We gambled with our heart and our soul and our artistic ability to make the film the best we could with what we had. This was going to be a breakout film for a lot of us.”
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Corman, who died last year at the age of 98, always insisted he hadn’t intended it to be anything else at first. “I thought, ‘This might be an interesting gamble to see if I can take something like this and do well,’” he told Business Insider in 2017.
After The Fantastic Four was finished, Eichinger bought out Corman’s investment, then struck a deal with Marvel Comics producer Avi Arad to sit on it indefinitely. Arad told journalists in 2002 that he had paid “a couple million dollars in cash and burned” the original film, according to Los Angeles magazine. The ploy had worked: Though the cheap-o Fantastic Four was never released, Eichinger, who died in 2011, remained tied to the franchise for the rest of his life. He was a credited producer on the first two Fox Fantastic Four features, released in 2005 and 2007.
For the rest of his life, Corman spoke fondly about his never-released Fantastic Four, and took pleasure in its underground fan base—even if it wasn’t quite as well-made or beloved as many of his other offbeat credits. “I think, for a million dollars, it’s a pretty good film,” he said in 2017. “It’s as if you’ve got one son who graduated from the top university in the world and is now a billionaire. You’ve got another son who’s an idiot. You love the idiot.”
The team signing on to The Fantastic Four knew they were in for a threadbare beginning, but had reason to hope it would be a stepping stone. Iconic directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Ron Howard, and Jonathan Demme had honed their skills in the trenches of Corman’s low-grade moviemaking machine. Jack Nicholson, Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone, and Robert De Niro were among the actors who made their breakthroughs in his pictures.
Underwood, who was 24 when he took on the role of Johnny Storm, already had a few credits to his name. He played the title character in the 1986 drama The Boy Who Could Fly, as well as the toxic boyfriend Bug opposite John Candy in Uncle Buck and a recurring role as Ernest Hemingway in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. The Fantastic Four was supposed to take him to a new level. “So we took it very seriously,” he says.
Hyde-White was the most experienced of the four, having acted in TV and movies for a decade and a half—starting with bit parts on Battlestar Galactica before moving to shows like Matlock and Hill Street Blues. He’s credited as young Henry, the father in the opening flashback scene from 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but his face isn’t shown (and Sean Connery supplied the voice.) Staab had been acting for about eight years, with a recurring role on the soap opera Guiding Light in the mid-’80s, and appearances on Cheers and Beverly Hills, 90210. The Fantastic Four would have been the first lead role for both of them.
Smith was a six-foot-four behemoth who had traded football aspirations for acting. He’d played Super Freddy in 1989’s A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child, and had a handful of TV bit parts to his name. As the human version of The Thing, he’d finally get to show his personality onscreen. The budget-stretched producers also got him to supply his own wardrobe. “Ben Grimm went to Empire State [University]. I went to Eastern Michigan. I have a letterman jacket, which I wore in the film, that has a big E on it,” says Smith.
They all recognized that the movie lacked the necessary resources, but it did seem to fit into a certain kind of kids programming from the era. Although it looks primitive now, the first Fantastic Four’s handcrafted practical effects and amateurish computer animation calls to mind the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a similar low-budget touchstone of the mid-’90s that is now fondly remembered. “I think these have a homemade charm to them, a spirit of let’s-put-on-a-show that is hard to deny,” Nashawaty says. “That stuff is infectious. It’s not high art, but it does embrace the dimestore quality of comic books.”
The actors say they worked for scale, the bare minimum that the Screen Actors Guild allows any performer to be paid.. Really, it cost them more than they got back. “I had an acting coach who said to me, ‘Whatever your first break is, you need to put money in marketing and advertising and boost that,’” Smith says. He sponsored his costars in the run-up to what they believed would be a gala premiere at the Mall of America. “I ended up paying about $15 grand for a publicist,” he says. “We went to children’s hospitals. We did radio shows. We had articles.”
At one point, flying back from a sci-fi convention, Smith gave a VHS of the trailer to a flight attendant, who put it on the airplane’s televisions. Hyde-White still remembers the rounds of applause that followed. “We knew we had a hit when US Airways liked it,” he says.
“They arranged conventions and autograph signings,” says Staab. “We traveled around promoting it, and not only was there an audience—there was a huge audience. It was a very excited and enthusiastic audience. These comic book fans were being acknowledged—that they were important, that their passion was important. It represented them and their world.”
Then they learned the hard truth about Eichinger’s deal with Marvel. “They didn’t want anything to come of it. They didn’t want it to make any of their other properties look bad,” Underwood says
It was a tough lesson about show business. “For some outside force to decide, ‘Well, we’re going to scrap this so that we can make a more expensive one down the line…” Staab says. “You go, ‘Okay, well, that’s the business part of it.’”
The ’94 movie was the butt of many jokes, but its status as a lost movie also gave it a kind of cache. In 1990, Matt Salinger played Captain America in a film now remembered mainly for the plastic ears affixed to the side of its patriotic hero’s head. If The Fantastic Four had been released, says Underwood, it likely would have met the same fate: indifference. “It probably would’ve gotten panned and trashed and then that would’ve been that. But because it has this whole fun Hollywood yarn that goes with it, it made for great storytelling.”
“That mystery is what became iconic,” Smith adds. “In a crazy twisted way, it’s a blessing that this happened.”
The ’94 castmates were overjoyed earlier this month when the movie website JoBlo.com declared their movie the best Fantastic Four adaptation, not counting the new Marvel Studios production—even if that’s a low bar. “It felt great,” Smith says. “Look at the other ones that they’re compared to, and their budgets. Trust me: If we had a bigger budget, we’d be kicking some serious butt.”
More importantly they were seen by the current creative team at Marvel Studios. As First Steps got underway, “Rebecca Staab and her manager reached out to the casting people and kind of tossed it out there: ‘Hey, do you think the production would consider putting us all in cameo kind of roles?’” Underwood says.
The Marvel Studios braintrust loved the idea. The ’94 stars felt like out-of-wedlock cousins, finally being invited to the official family reunion—or at least the film’s southern California reshoots, which happened this past May.
Hyde-White and Staab are still working actors with dozens of credits to their names. Hyde-White has had roles on Landman, Reasonable Doubt, and movies such as Gods and Generals and Catch Me If You Can, while Staab was on The Night Agent, Superman & Lois, and Family Law. They were given speaking lines as newscasters in First Steps.
Underwood is now a pastor, and Smith is a writer and tech entrepreneur. Their cameos are as bystanders in a factory, but all four got a spotlight moment in the newsreel that plays near the beginning of the movie. “There’s this whole montage of people around the city saying, “Thank you, Fantastic Four…. Thank you, Fantastic Four,” Smith says. “We say that.”
But really, this was Fantastic Four’s way of saying thank you to them.
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