The most recent trailer for Fox’s latest attempt at a Fantastic Four movie has successfully convinced me to NOT watch it in the theaters. The trailers seem really dedicated to the idea of selling this new film as being virtually identical to the 2005 film, which I consider somewhat baffling considering the almost complete failure of that film. (The only thing I liked about it were the family dynamics, particularly those between the Human Torch and Ben Grimm.)

This also caused me to ruminate on the difficulty movie and TV studios seem to have in adapting Doctor Doom. A common refrain is that you can’t just put the bad guy in a face-covering mask, which prompts a wide variety of efforts to work around that “problem”. This is also something I find baffling. (And I can see that Darth Vader agrees with me, because he’s scratching his helmet.)

I also note that it’s become quite fashionable to give Doctor Doom superpowers, usually by linking his “origin” to the same accident that creates the Fantastic Four. This doesn’t baffle me (I can see the appeal of narrative conservation that motivates the decision), but it’s nevertheless wrong, in my opinion, because it undermines the contrast between Doom’s approach to power and Reed Richards’ approach to power (which also, of course, echoes their approach to science). It also tends to result in creators conflating Doom’s experimental error (which results in his face becoming scarred) with Richards’ experimental error (which results in the creation of the FF), which is another huge mistake: If Richards is responsible, then Doom’s rage towards him is justified. If Doom is responsible, Richards no longer bears the burden of what he’s done to his family. And, in either case, you lose the (often-overlooked) thematic contrast between how Richards and Doom reacted to their failures.

In any case, I suspect that the new Fantastic Four franchise isn’t going to work out. Which I suspect means that about 5-10 years from now we’ll see either Fox or Disney trying to reboot the franchise again. That gave me cause to consider how I would adapt the FF to film. And it also made me think about how you could do justice to Doctor Doom (particularly because he’ll have been fairly significantly screwed up twice at that point).

I think the key is to realize that Doctor Doom is the evil Iron Man: He’s a scientific and engineering genius with immense resources at his command (as the leader of a small country) and he has a legion of Doombots to do his bidding (which makes the comparison with the MCU Tony Stark particularly appropriate).

So if I was Fox and trying to figure out how to use the Fantastic Four to launch a superhero franchise, the first film I’d greenlight wouldn’t be Fantastic Four. It would be DOCTOR DOOM. The FF wouldn’t even appear in this film (although Reed Richards might appear in flashbacks). This movie basically says, “What if Tony Stark came out of the cave and decided to use his Iron Man suits to conquer the world?” It would be a film about a supervillain in a world with no superheroes. Which means that Doom wins. He wins a lot. By the end of the first movie he basically controls Europe and has declared war on the United States and China simultaneously.

The elevator pitch is: It’s House of Cards in a superhero universe.

It also carries with it the advantage of doing something with superheroes that we haven’t seen in the cinema yet, which will help our hypothetical reboot stand out from both the previous FF failures and the crowded field of other superhero properties.

The second movie is FANTASTIC FOUR. It starts about midway through the first film with Reed Richards working on some top secret project for the U.S. government. As the threat of Doctor Doom grows in Europe, however, Richards’ security clearance is suddenly revoked because it turns out he used to be college roommates with Doom. So Richards — along with Ben, Sue, and Johnny — are forced to sneak back into the research facility and launch the experimental vehicle (which, of course, goes spectacularly wrong and they all get exposed to cosmic rays). And so now, about midway through this film, you’ve got a superhero team who can go up against a supervillain in full ascendance.