In Hollywood’s race to reboot, remake, and just generally fix every one of its disappointing superhero franchises, the one nut studios haven’t been able to crack is the Fantastic Four. We’re now three movies and two unique cinematic universes into that particular franchise, and none of them have lived up to the potential of their iconic characters. So when it was announced a few months ago that 20th Century Fox would be angling for a more kid-friendly reboot of the Fantastic Four, people figured, sure, why not. I mean, it’s not like they’re going to muck up these movies any worse.

This weekend, a few additional details emerged about the movie, and they might need a little bit of explaining. According to Bleeding Cool (via /Film), acclaimed comic book author Mark Millar was in the middle of writing a children’s book called Kindergarten Heroes that would follow the exploits of a handful of superpowered youth. Millar sold the movie option for the book to 20th Century Fox, even though the book itself never ended up happening; now Fox is looking to use that option as the basis for its rebooted Fantastic Four movie. Bleeding Cool’s sources claim that Fox has now merged together the Kindergarten Heroes script with its preexisting concept for Fantastic Four to create a movie about the superchildren of Reed Richards and Susan Storm.

So, basically, if the rumor is correct, Fox is going to take the shell of a story it liked, plug in a bunch of familiar faces, and perhaps profit? Given the decades of source material to work with, it’s kind of an interesting and/or bold decision for Fox to pull in some unrelated project for the Fantastic Four movie, but if the studio liked the tone Millar had struck with his children’s book, why not grab it? It’s not like Millar is a stranger to writing for comic book characters; if it turns out that Fox was finally able to crack its Marvel characters by going outside that universe altogether, then I guess any ends justify the means.

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