Kevin Feige never wants to face the issues he faced with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania again, and he’ll make sure Marvel Studios does anything to avoid that.
As the most recent MCU entry fizzled at the box office and received the studio’s second-ever Rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes, we see the usually carefree studio dive into a slight panic mode. In the latest story from The Hollywood Reporter, we’ve learned that there’s a new writer for the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, a reportedly big deal for Marvel Studios.
Writer Josh Friedman (Avatar: The Way of Water, Snowpiercer) has been tapped to write the script, taking over from Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer, the previous writers on the project.
THR notes that Marvel Studios bringing on Friedman as the writer “signals a potential change in tone” for the project. Kaplan and Springer are newer creators in Hollywood. They are mostly known for comedies they are developing, like the Rebel Wilson comedy K-Pop: Lost in America and Max Barbakow’s Disaster Wedding. Friedman is a more established sci-fi writer; he co-wrote Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and later became the writer-creator of the cult classic Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
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Friedman will likely guide this spacey Marvel adventure in a more classic sci-fi direction, especially under WandaVision‘s Matt Shakman. At the time of writing, there’s still no update on the cast for the project.
Fantastic Four is set for release on February 14th, 2025.