Director Jon Watts Exits Marvel’s ‘Fantastic Four’

Jon Watts will no longer be directing the upcoming Fantastic Four film.

Watts, who helmed the massively successful Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Spider-Man: No Way Home for Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios, has withdrawn from the Marvel Cinematic Universe project.

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“Making three Spider-Man films was an incredible and life-changing experience for me. I’m eternally grateful to have been a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for seven years. I’m hopeful we’ll work together again, and I can’t wait to see the amazing vision for Fantastic Four brought to life,” Watts said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Said Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and co-president Louis D’Esposito in a statement, “Collaborating with Jon on the Spider-Man films has been a true pleasure. We were looking forward to continuing our work with him to bring the Fantastic Four into the MCU but understand and are supportive of his reasons for stepping away. We are optimistic that we will have the opportunity to work together again at some point down the road.”

It was Feige who made the announcement Watts would helm Fantastic Four back in December 2020 during Disney’s Investors Day presentation.

Fantastic Four, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, kicked off Marvel Comics in 1961. It was that comic book that reinvented the periodical publisher known as Timely and made comic book superheroes more realistic and relatable to audiences.

The comic may have found success right out of the gate, but adaptations to the big screen never really secured solid footing. In the mid-1990s, Roger Corman produced a low-rent, hokey feature that never made it to theaters — but can be found on YouTube. In the 2000s, when 20th Century had IP rights, Tim Story directed two movies that starred Chris Evans and Jessica Alba, among others. That pair of films performed so-so at the box office, but critics and most fans were unenthusiastic.

A 2015 reboot directed by Josh Trank starring Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan was D.O.A after critics and fans flatly rejected the motion picture for a number of reasons.

Marvel Studios reacquired the film rights to their characters when Disney bought 21st Century Fox in 2019. Since that time, fans have been clamoring for a Fantastic Four film that does the iconic comic book justice.

5 p.m. Updated with comment from Watts.

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