Roger Corman on the success of FANTASTIC FOUR
Date: Monday, November 20, 2000Gentlemen,
I greatly enjoyed Steve Ryfle's witty feature article of 10/9/00, 'BLACK SCORPION debuts Big, Bad Car at Peterson Automotive Museum.' Just for the record, however, I'd like to point out that the reference to '...Corman's disastrous, legally suppressed live-action Fantastic Four movie' is inaccurate. In fact, this was one of my most successful projects, and you might be interested to know why.
The Fantastic Four movie was a co-production with Newe Constantin Film Producktion GMBH, and we had an agreement which gave Newe Constantin a window to try to sell the finished film to a major. Newe Constantin sold the movie to Fox, and bought us out. Fox liked the movie but wanted to do it as a $60-million picture. The producer then told me, 'I'm going to release our $1-million movie as a prequel - and make more money than the $60-million one.'
Sincerely,
Roger Corman
