Should I even bother getting my hopes up for this new Fantastic Four movie?

This is a tough call. A really tough call. And personally, I want this to work. But I’ve been burned before.

I was burned in 2005, when the first big-budget Fantastic Four movie hit theaters. This was going to be the big one. This was going to take the greatest superhero family from the comic books and onto the big screen. And since the previous permutations of the FF were all television cartoon shows – a 1960’s era Hanna-Barbera action series, a 1979 cartoon that removed the Human Torch and replaced him with a robot named Herbie (ecch), and a 1999-era tongue-in-cheek cartoon series that was just absolutely crapola to watch – I had hoped this big-screen adaptation of the Fantastic Four would be a hit.

And it was a hit … sorta. The plotline was all over the place, and their big main adversary – Doctor Doom – looked nothing like the metal-clad Latverian despot of the comics. In other words … it had its moments, but there was so much more potential there that wasn’t truly realized.

A few years later, a sequel came out – Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. And I had big hopes for this one, it was a retelling of one of the FF’s most legendary arcs – the arrival of the planet-devouring entity Galactus and his herald, the Silver Surfer. Again … the movie was okay. I’m not thrilled with their depiction of Galactus as some Mellegianic space cloud, but maybe it was a budget issue.

Then we go to 2015, and there’s an entirely new Fantastic Four movie. With an entirely new cast as the crime-fighting superhero family. And to say that this movie was a letdown … is an insult to true letdowns. The movie was a scrambled mess, and several of the attention-grabbing scenes in the movie trailers never even made it into the final film. Ugh.

Then the next thing I see is an appearance by Reed Richards in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where he’s part of an Illuminati-based universe that contains Patrick Stewart as Charles “Professor X” Xavier and Hayley Atwell as an alternative-universe female Captain America. And Reed Richards’ appearance lasted only a few minutes before his opponent simply stripped him down to his fibral elements and destroyed him.

Thanks for playing, come again.

Now that the rights to the Fantastic Four have transferred over to the Walt Disney Company, there are plans for a complete reboot of the series and an attempt to integrate the FF into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And to that point, they’ve already added their potential castmember – Pedro Pascal, he of The Mandalorian and The Last of Us and Game of Thrones and a dozen other genre movies.

Great. I could get behind Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards. I suppose.

But I have to be totally honest. I’ve been burned too many times by failed Fantastic Four cinematic creations. I hope and I hope that the stories will reignite those incredible comic book battles that made me sprint to the drugstore every month for the new issues. I need to see the true big bad villains from the comics. I need to see Annihilus and the Negative Zone. I need to see the Frightful Four and the Super-Skrull. And I’d better see the Sub-Mariner – yeah, I know Prince Namor was in the last Black Panther movie, but damn it there’s still that unrequited love he has for Susan Storm, that could be a three-hour film in and of itself.

And I need to see Galactus. Not a Mellagianic cluod version – I need to see the giant with the pointed headgear. And Doctor Doom needs the armor and the green cowl. These are big bad opponents and they could power the MCU for decades. Hell, I’d be happy if Doctor Doom took over as the main villain over Kang the Conqueror if Marvel wanted to pivot that way.

Make this look impressive. I don’t need to see Ben Grimm as a guy in a big fat orange rubber suit. I don’t need to see Johnny Storm as a poorly-generated CGI Human Torch creation. And they need to cast an actress to play Susan Storm as she truly is – the most powerful member of the FF.

But do it right. Please. I’m sick of hearing news about an upcoming Fantastic Four movie and thinking, “Well, maybe they’ll make it suck less this time.”

I could at least hope.