Joseph Culp, who played Doctor Doom in the movie, supports an official release, 30 years later.
Thirty years after it was first made, Fantastic Four star Joseph Culp is encouraging fans to lobby for an official release. The movie, produced by the late Roger Corman, was made on a shoestring budget in 1994, specifically to hold onto the rights. The $1 million production was never intended to see the light of day, the actors were lied to, and all negatives were supposed to have been destroyed, but a VHS-quality cut of the movie has been circulating since the 1990s, and these days, exists on sites like YouTube. Culp, who played Doctor Doom in the film, recently shared a link to a petition with thousands of signatures urging Marvel/Disney to release the movie.
The movie was made because producer Bernd Eichinger, who had acquired the film rights, saw the potential in big-budget superhero adaptations, but he didn’t have the time or money to get production like that underway. With a contract that granted him perpetual rights, provided a movie was made within a certain window, he turned to Corman to find out if there was a way to get the movie made, quickly and inexpensively, in order to technically fulfill that clause in the contract.
Fans have lobbied for an official release for years. Marvel producer Avi Arad previously suggested that he had ordered all of the film’s negatives destroyed, rendering any high resolution release impossible, but some don’t believe him. In 2015, a documentary called Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four, was released, featuring new and archival interviews with members of the cast and crew. That movie is available on DVD and Digital. There’s even a version on eBay that comes packaged with a director’s commentary for Fantastic Four.
According to Corman himself, the movie didn’t get released because Eichinger managed to score a deal with Fox. Basically, they would make a big-budget version of the movie (that turned out to be the 2005 movie directed by Tim Story), and as part of the deal, Eichinger would agree never to release the $1 million version.
“It can’t get an official release,” Corman told me in 2016. “It really started with Bernd Eichinger, a German producer who had the rights to the Fantastic Four. He came to me, I think, in October of one year and said his option on the rights was going to expire if he didn’t start shooting by the end of the year, and he had a $30 million budget and he didn’t have the $30 million. Could I make it for less money? I said, ‘how much do you have?’ He said, ‘I’ve got a million dollars.’…Cutting $29 million out of a $30 million budget is pretty extensive surgery, but we ended up making the film. Part of the deal was, he would have a certain amount of time to see if he could make a deal with a major studio. If he didn’t, I would release it, but if he did, he would pay me some additional money. He came almost up to the period where I was going to release it, and he made a deal with Fox, and part of the deal was that he would not release the million-dollar picture because it would interfere with what eventually became a $60 million picture. So simply by contract, that picture cannot be officially released, but there are bootleg copies around.”
Of course, now that Fox and Marvel are both owned by Disney, it would likely be up to Kevin Feige if he wanted to make some kind of official release happen. With a big-budget Fantastic Four movie heading into production soon, it’s unlikely he would want to draw a lot of attention to the Corman version…but who knows? It’s entirely possible he could see a release as a valuable promotional tool as the “real” movie draws closer.
The film’s 30th anniversary and the dwindling disc market certainly feel like a great opportunity to finally put Fantastic Four on DVD, and capture the attention of the collector’s market, but if it’s true the studio does not have access to a higher quality print than the existing VHS rips, it could be seen as pointless.
In the meantime, the movie itself is flawed, and cheap, and kind of silly — but every time a new Fantastic Four movie comes out, there’s some commentor somewhere pointing out all the things producer Corman and director Oley Sassone did better than the big guys.
