‘Fantastic Four’ Hires ‘Avatar 4’ Scribe Josh Friedman To Rewrite Script
Josh Friedman, one of the many writers that worked on Avatar: The Way of Water, has been tapped to handle a rewrite on the script of the upcoming Marvel Studios event film Fantastic Four, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Matt Shakman is directing.
The original duo working on the script were Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer. The trade speculates that Kaplan and Springer are mostly known for their comedy writing, while Friedman, who is more well-versed in the sci-fi world-building, may have been brought on board to punch up the more serious aspects of the Fantastic Four script. It must also be noted that their last credited movie on IMDb to make it to light was 2014’s The Last of the Great Romantics, which they both co-wrote. They are attached as writers on two projects in pre-production, the Rebel Wilson starrer K-Pop: Lost in America and Max Barbakow’s Disaster Wedding.
It’s entirely possible that Marvel wasn’t feeling great about the state of the script and needed someone to punch it up. Friedman, who has a “story by” credit on Avatar 2 as part of the movie’s writers’ room, but who also worked on Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and the James Cameron-produced Terminator: Dark Fate, and developed the TNT series Snowpiercer, came in as a logical choice. He is supposed to be the main writer on the fourth Avatar film, which according to Cameron didn’t get a single studio note when they submitted the first draft.
WandaVision director Matt Shakman is attached to captain the film, and despite the multitude of casting rumors surrounding it, the most likely scenario is that casting has barely started. Deadline senior reporter Justin Kroll tweeted out last month that the process was about to heat up, but if Marvel hired Friedman to go back to the drawing board on the script, it’s possible they slowed down the process. It all comes down now to how heavy of a rewrite this will be. If it’s simply punching up the script and the studio is confident about moving on to pre-production, the movie could be in a good place to start filming early next year as planned. Otherwise, we might be looking at another delay.
However, this is not necessarily bad news. Marvel infamously changes their mind on the third act of their movies while they are deep into post-production, many times because cameras started rolling before the script was rock-solid. This has caused many headaches (to be gentle about it) at their VFX vendors and is one of the reasons why Marvel has a terrible reputation with the visual effects industry. Just this week, news also broke about Thunderbolts hiring Beef creator Lee Sung Jin to rewrite the script by Eric Pearson (Black Widow); reporter Jeff Sneider said on the most recent episode of The Hot Mic podcast that Marvel got rid of the previous draft as it was too focused on the Black Widow characters and not as much on the rest of the team. The new draft may already be completed, though, from the sound of things.
Fantastic Four is scheduled to hit theaters on February 14, 2025, but as with everything from Marvel Studios at the moment, expect changes.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
