It all started in the fall of 1992, with a German film producer and an American B-movie legend. That producer, Bernd Eichinger, held the film rights to the comic book superheroes the Fantastic Four and hoped to bring them to the big screen. But it needed to be done fast and cheap — his rights to the characters would expire at the end of the year unless he had a movie in production, and his budget was only $1 million.
He found a partner in Roger Corman, perhaps the foremost filmmaker when it came to making cult movies with minimal budgets. The duo tapped Oley Sassone — whose credits included music videos for John Lee Hooker and Gloria Estefan and the Corman feature “Bloodfist III: First to Fight” — to direct a story focusing on the origins of the Fantastic Four. The movie would track how the brilliant scientist Reed Richards (played by Alex Hyde-White), former pilot Ben Grimm (Michael Bailey Smith) and siblings Susan (Rebecca Staab) and Johnny Storm (Jay Underwood) came back from a space mission that transformed them into a superhuman team.
“I knew what I was getting into, but it didn’t matter, because it was the Fantastic Four,” Sassone said in a recent phone interview. The opportunity to make a movie about the characters he loved was worth whatever frustrations potentially awaited him due to financial constraints.
As “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” arrives in theaters this weekend with a $200 million budget and starry cast led by Pedro Pascal, it’s hard to imagine the situation Sassone found himself in. The current landscape for superhero movies couldn’t be more different than it was some 30 years ago. If it wasn’t Batman or Superman, movies based on comic-book characters were then mostly dismissed as cheesy and juvenile and not worth a big investment.
Joseph Culp landed the role of Doctor Doom, the film’s primary antagonist, and has fond memories of the film’s beginnings. “We don’t have the money, but what we have is the story and character,” he remembered thinking. “And at the end of the day, that is what we as fans or audience members are really going to gravitate to.”
Culp recalled marching into his audition wearing an ankle-length oilskin duster from Australia before he “took it to the rafters” in a performance inspired by Frank Langella’s downright Shakespearean Skeletor in the 1987 movie “Masters of the Universe.” Sassone’s response, Culp gleefully remembers, encouraged him to go even bigger with Doom. This level of grandiosity matched the scope of Sassone’s vision for the film. But, Culp says, there was an “ongoing friction, I would say, between what we wanted to achieve and what we had the resources to achieve.”
From the start of shooting, the production schedule maintained a breakneck pace. There was no time for table reads, let alone rehearsals. The entire venture was as far removed from a modern, mega-budget Marvel movie as could be. The single studio where filming took place was a condemned, rat-infested warehouse where a stray cat was the main pest control. The costume budget was basically nonexistent, so much so that the stitching and proportions on the team’s classic blue jumpsuits were visibly inconsistent. And the set was recycled from another Corman movie, a “Jurassic Park” knockoff called “Carnosaur.”
The special effects were a disaster, to put it lightly. “I remember the first shot I saw of Reed’s mechanical arms, which looked like a bendy Gumby sort of thing,” Culp recalled. “And I just went, ‘Oh no, that doesn’t look good. Tell me we’re not going to go there.’”
The team took making the film as seriously as any other, despite the setbacks. Sassone made the core cast and crew read copies of Fantastic Four issue No. 1 to make sure they were all on the same page about holding true to the material. The actors also dived deep into researching their roles; after all, they imagined this would be a breakout opportunity.
“We didn’t mind these conditions, because you go, ‘We will earn it. We’ll earn the right to have better conditions,’” Rebecca Staab, who played Sue Storm, said in a phone interview. “And so I think that’s also why everybody put so much into it, because wouldn’t this be great if we can do another one and another one and another one?”
The cast and crew pushed through and had completed filming on their short schedule by mid-January. But suddenly the sprint turned into a wait. The film stalled in postproduction, which seemed an ominous sign. Soon it became a question of whether the film would ever be finished. “We just knew then something was wrong, but we had no idea the depth of the whole thing,” Sassone recalled.
A trailer had already been cut and released — it’s easily found on YouTube — and the movie was still slated to hit theaters. So the cast and crew did what they could to push the project along, even at their own time and expense. Sassone and the editor, Glenn Garland, completed their edits clandestinely. The soundtrack’s composers helped pay for a 48-piece orchestra. The cast toured to comic conventions and comic book stores to promote the movie on their own dime.
Eventually they were working toward a January 1994 premiere at Minnesota’s Mall of America, the country’s biggest mall, which had become a destination since its opening in 1992. That premiere never happened; the film was ordered to cease and desist all promotions. It turned out that Eichinger’s Neue Constantin studio was in talks with 20th Century Fox for the rights to make Fantastic Four films — what would become the 2005 and 2007 films directed by Tim Story.
Then another narrative emerged: that the Sassone-directed version of “Fantastic Four” was never intended to be released at all. Even the Fantastic Four creator Stan Lee, who had visited the set more than once, later publicly dismissed the movie, distancing himself and Marvel from a low-budget outing that could cast a pall on the bigger productions to come.
The film wasn’t just permanently shelved; the former Marvel Studios C.E.O. Avi Arad paid Corman and Neue Constantin for the movie and claimed to have burned all prints of it. “We didn’t have a good, pristine copy,” Sassone said. “We never got a decent copy from anybody. They confiscated it.” Over the years it became something of a hit on the bootleg underground. Eventually, rough and grainy copies started surfacing at conventions and on eBay. Now some very poor quality versions and clips of the film exist on YouTube.
“Who knows where we’d have ended up had the film been released? It may have just flopped,” Sassone said. “At the same time, the thing was getting buzz.”
There hasn’t been much good buzz for the Fantastic Four in its recent incarnations. The 2005 film and its sequel, both starring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis, were more unmemorable than egregiously bad, with characters that mostly blended in with the scenery.
In 2015 the director Josh Trank’s brooding, sluggishly paced reboot, starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell, attempted to bring more life and back story to its heroes. A visual and stylistic hard left turn from Story’s films, this darkly lit and annihilation-themed “Fantastic Four” felt leagues away from the original comics and collapsed under the weight of its own self-seriousness. It flopped with both critics and fans.
When asked about the Fantastic Four movies that followed his, Sassone respectfully begins with the qualifier that making movies, especially about such a beloved property, is a difficult task. But if he could offer a criticism of the other three films, he says they didn’t approach the Fantastic Four “as an ensemble piece.” “They didn’t dig deep enough; their personality traits in those earlier films, I think, were superficial,” Sassone continued. “I don’t think they respected the comic book fans or what was written in the beginning.”
There has been steady interest in the 1994 film over the years. In 2015, the writer-director Marty Langford released the documentary “Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four,” which featured interviews with many of the film’s cast and crew. Langford, who now teaches as a professor of digital media production at American International College, said in a phone interview that “Doomed” was originally supposed to be a documentary about the search for the negative print of the film, but when they failed to find any leads, they decided to pivot and make a documentary that “celebrated the movie and took them seriously, because so few people did.” Last year, on the 30th anniversary of the abandoned “Fantastic Four,” Culp started a petition on Change.org calling on Marvel Studios “to remaster and release this hidden gem through streaming platforms, Blu-ray, and live screenings.”
“I think the one thing it did that none of the other versions — the Tim Story movies or the Josh Trank film — they never really centered in on the family aspect of the Fantastic Four,” Langford said. “How Reed and Sue are a couple, how Johnny and Sue are brother and sister, how Reed and Ben are best friends; they had such a tight family unit. But it does look like that’s what Marvel’s doing with it, which is so wonderful. They’re reinforcing the fact that this is a family first.”
Sassone says he genuinely hopes the new “Fantastic Four” is a “big hit” because he remains a loyal fan of the characters.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing the new one more so than any of the others because it’s the Fantastic Four: the beginning. It goes back to the 1960s, and that’s what we tried to do in our film,” Sassone said.
It’s true that this new take on the heroes feels like a corrective of what’s come before. The film’s sleek, retrofuturistic ’60s style provides a nostalgic comic book aesthetic that’s in contrast to the contemporary look of its predecessors. References to the original Fantastic Four comics — like the antagonist of the first issue, the Moleman — abound.
And, as Langford predicted, this fresh and shiny new cast — Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach — define the characters less by their fantastic abilities than by their familial ties. This result is a team that is warm and inviting.
Though fans have yet to see an officially released and remastered version of Corman’s “The Fantastic Four,” the original cast can finally be seen on the big screen — “First Steps” pays tribute to its predecessor with cameo appearances by the original “Fantastic Four” actors.
“It indicates to me that Marvel, after all these years, has given our movie a nod and recognizes it as part of the F4 canon,” Sassone said.
They appear separately in small roles throughout the film, such as newscasters reporting on the Four, and in an early scene they appear together on the Ed Sullivan-esque “Ted Gilbert Show” joining in a salute to the Fantastic Four. It’s so quick that you might miss it, but for those in the know, it’s validation of the significant role that unreleased 1994 film still holds in these heroes’ cinematic legacy.
“It shows respect for the F4 fans,” Sassone said, “and their decades of support for our movie.”
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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