Is this the real reason why 'Fantastic Four' tanked? Producer weighs in on film's failure

Last year's Fantastic Four reboot was one of the biggest commercial and critical failures in the popular superhero genre in recent times. The makers decided to go with a dark theme for the otherwise fun and campy comic book heroes, and it clearly backfired.

The reboot is a prime example of how tampering with the source material while adapting a beloved comic book series is a bad idea. During a recent podcast on Happy Sad Confused to promote "X-Men: Apocalypse," writer and producer Simon Kinberg opened up on where he believes they might have gone wrong with the film (via ComicBookMovie).

"I don't think that there is, in any movie that doesn't work, a single decision that is the reason that that movie doesn't work," he explained. "I think that there were many decisions we made along the way that led to a movie that people didn't like and to a movie that I would do differently next time."

Kinberg added: "I think the biggest takeaway for me the tone of the movie, while really interesting and ambitious, ran counter to the DNA of the source material. I think the source material of Fantastic Four is bright, optimistic, poppy in tone. There's a sort of plucky spirit to those characters, and we made a darker, sort of body-horror kind of version of Fantastic Four, which again as I say it now sounds really interesting and cerebrally ambitious, but isn't necessarily Fantastic Four."

Well, despite the epic failure, it doesn't look like 20th Century Fox has any plans of giving up the franchise. "It's a big part of [Fox's superhero] plan going forward... I would love to continue making movies with that cast," said Kinberg. Maybe the studio can do what Marvel did with Spider-Man and introduce the Fantastic Four in a shared universe alongside the X-Men.