J. Michael Straczynski Confirms His Silver Surfer Script is Dead
Posted by Darren in: News
Scene from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Verifying my speculation in this article, during a recent interview with Collider Babylon 5 guru J. Michael Straczynski has confirmed that his original script for the Silver Surfer movie will no longer be suitable for the upcoming film.
Straczynski wrote a script for a Silver Surfer movie that was slated to be a sequel to Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The script was said to be pretty good, taking off immediately from the end of Fantastic Four 2 and picking up the back story of why Silver Surfer was working for Galactus. The story was to follow the Silver Surfer as he raced to his homeworld in fear that his betrayal of Galactus would lead the planet eater back there to destroy it. Sounds cool, but that’s not the story we’re going to get.
From Collider:
Q: Is your Silver Surfer draft dead?
JMS: What happened was when FF2 didn’t do as well as they hoped it would do, it caused them to call into question a Silver Surfer movie. The script that I wrote picked up right where FF2 left off. So if they do a Silver Surfer film down the road, it’ll have to be its own separate things.
Q: Fans thought the tone wasn’t right. Was yours geared at children?
JMS: It was definitely adult fare. I wanted to tell the origin of the Surfer and get into that whole thing.
From the tone of Straczynski’s reply it would seem he’s also completely unaware of what’s happening with the Silver Surfer film. It’s probably fair to say that Fox don’t intend for him to be involved given that the script for the film is, apparently, in active development as we speak. If true that, to my mind, is potentially bad news – although I say that without any clue as to who is actually working on the script. Fox are deathly quiet on dropping any screenwriter names, so what exactly ‘active development’ means right now is anybody’s guess.
For now, we just have to sit tight and be happy that it is in active development.
