Michael Chiklis stands up for his “underrated” Fantastic Four movies

Say what you will about the 2005 Fantastic Four movie and its 2007 follow-up Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer – and I will say that I don’t think they were very good movies – but did they handle one character very well: Ben Grimm / The Thing, as played by Michael Chiklis. With a new Fantastic Four movie out in theatres now (the Marvel Cinematic Universe entry The Fantastic Four: First Steps), the folks at Collider sat down for an interview with Chiklis, and he took some time to defend the two Fantastic Four movies he worked on, saying they’re underrated films that critics were wrong about.

Chiklis told Collider, “There were a lot of people, I think, critically who got it wrong. They really maligned our films, and they were very underrated considering… they were very loved by the audience. It was one of those cases where critics weren’t great to those films, but the audience was, and that still remains. I’ve always sort of quietly gone like, okay, say what you want to say, but the people see it. And now all these years later, people are sort of acknowledging like, hey, these films are family-friendly, fun movies… they got a lot right. They may be imperfect, but they’re really good movies.“

Chiklis and his Fantastic Four co-stars – Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards, Jessica Alba as Sue Storm, Chris Evans as Johnny Storm – were contracted for three movies, but the third never made it into production. Made on a budget somewhere between $87.5 and $100 million, the 2005 Fantastic Four movie earned $333.5 million at the global box office, which was enough to get the sequel greenlit rather quickly. Fox boosted the budget for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer to $130 million, but the sequel couldn’t quite match the box office at its predecessor, finishing with $301.9 million. That was a bit of a disappointment. Fox considered making a third movie in the series briefly – but rather than going ahead with a sequel with a slightly lower budget (Might as well, right? The actors were already locked in.), just two years after Rise of the Silver Surfer was released, they announced that they were moving forward with a reboot, starting the superhero team over from scratch. Then it took six years for the reboot to come together… and it turned out to be the most poorly-received Fantastic Four movie ever made.

The Chiklis and co. version of the Fantastic Four was scrapped, but Chris Evans did make an appearance as Johnny Storm in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.

What do you think of what Michael Chiklis had to say about his Fantastic Four movies? Do you agree with him that they’re underrated, really good movies? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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