The Fantastic Four reboot didn’t show off any footage at Comic-Con this past summer, but the film’s lead, Miles Teller, says we can start shaking off the cobwebs left from the poorly reviewed 2005 take on the comic-book characters. “It’s different in every way,” Teller told Vulture last night at a screening of his new film Whiplash, hosted by the Cinema Society and Brooks Brothers. “All those actors were a lot older, their characters were in different places. The tone of this film is completely different: We don’t have Michael Chiklis in a big Styrofoam thing, and I think that [a more grounded approach] is what people are into — X-Men: First Class is doing that. You’re dealing with these characters but you’re making them real people in how they exist day-to-day. People wanted it to be taken more seriously than the kind of Dick Tracy, kitschy, overly comic-book world.”
Is Teller worried about superhero-movie saturation when Fantastic Four debuts next June? “At the end of the day, it depends on the product,” he said. “Guardians of the Galaxy was a really fresh take on it, I think people responded to that. In terms of where we are in the schedule, we’re playing the same weekend they were playing. But it’s a big summer: You’ve got Avengers, and my buddy [Whiplash co-star J.K. Simmons] is in Terminator, and you got Jurassic World. There’s a ton of movies out there, so if people have an appetite for it, they’ll see a couple, and if not, maybe they’ll just see one.” And if they see one, Teller hopes they’ll see Four.
