Fox’s X-Men vs Fantastic Four movie: Everything we know

X-Men: First Class writer was to write the X-Men vs Fantastic Four script

Back in 2019, it was revealed during Kevin Smith’s Fatman Beyond podcast that Zack Stentz, who was one of the writers for 2011’s X-Men: First Class, had written and submitted a script to Fox which included a multitude of Marvel characters the studio owned at the time. He commented:

"“My ex-partner and I, when we were working at Fox and we were working on X-Men: First Class, we did a secret movie for them that, I can’t tell you what the plot was, but I can tell you that it used all of the characters, all of the Marvel characters that Fox had at the time in 2011.”"

Stentz also commented further that they “almost had Paul Greengrass directing it,” which confirms that both Greengrass and Stentz were discussing the same film when talking about the proposed Fox project.

It also was not the only time Stentz had worked on a Fantastic Four project, as the writer revealed during his discussion with Kevin Smith that he had originally penned a script for Josh Trank’s version of the team:

"“It [the script] was how the Fantastic Four were almost the Fantastic Five except a young man named Victor von Doom was just too damaged and f—ed up to be part of them. It was a script I was very proud of. Josh Trank didn’t wanna do it.”"

While it is not clear whether the script Stentz penned would have resulted in a better film than the critically-panned released of Trank’s film, which only scored an abysmal 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, it would have been interesting to see the screenwriter tackle Marvel’s First Family in X-Men vs Fantastic Four.