While Chris Columbus is arguably best known for directing the first two Home Alone movies, he’s also someone who knows his way around fantastical material, as evidenced by his work on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Percy Jackson and Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, among other projects. However, he has yet to delve into the superhero genre, though it’s not for lack of trying. There was a time when Columbus was going to direct a Fantastic Four movie, and I’m frankly shocked by the reason it didn’t pan out for him.
Columbus recalled his time with Marvel’s First Family while appearing on the Fade to Black Podcast to talk about his new movie The Thursday Murder Club, which is streamable with a Netflix subscription. This was a decade before the Fantastic Four movie starred Ioan Gruffud, Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans came out, and apparently the director’s interest in adhering to the team’s early source material turned off executives at 20th Century Fox. He recalled:
We were in a weird situation. On the first Fantastic Four, I had worked on a script. There were a lot of writers involved. And then they were about to make a movie and we were producing it. I came in and met with the director and the producer, and had some ideas. I basically said, ‘Some of this conceptual art should feel more like Jack Kirby, who was the artist on the Fantastic Four, and should feel more like the Silver Age of Marvel.’ I left that meeting, and on the way back to my house, I got a call from the head of 20th Century Fox saying, ‘You’re fired. You had too much of an opinion.’
This happened in 1995, a year after the very first live-action Fantastic Four movie went unreleased, and the same year when Batman Forever was the only superhero movie to hit theaters. The genre was still a more than half a decade away from blowing up in popularity with the likes of Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man. So while nowadays Chris Columbus’ idea to pull more those first Fantastic Four comics that Jack Kirby illustrated and Stan Lee wrote them would surely be welcomed, 30 years ago, apparently just mention that in a discussion about concept art was enough for him to get canned.
I can’t help but wonder if there was more to this unceremonious exit than the Mrs. Doubtfire director divulged in this interview, but regardless, the damage was done. Though Chris Columbus still received an executive producer credit on 2005’s Fantastic Four and 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, he had he had nothing to do with making them. Columbus would go on to write scripts for Daredevil and Spider-Man, but eventually his desire to make a superhero movie dissipated. The filmmaker continued:
Over the years, people have done it so well that I’ve personally lost interest in making a superhero movie. It started a little bit with Spider-Man 2. When I saw what Sam Raimi did with Spider-Man 2, at the time, I thought it was a perfect superhero movie. And then bits and pieces along the way. The first Batman films that were done, and certainly Matt Reeves’ The Batman with [Robert] Pattinson. I thought it was a brilliant film. And I realized I don’t have a desire to make those movies anymore. People are doing them better than I could ever imagine doing at this point in my career.
So if you’ve been waiting for the day when it’s announced that Chris Columbus will direct a Marvel or DC movie, it’s time to put that dream to rest. He’s comfortable watching other directors play around in the superhero genre while he pursues other cinematic endeavors. That includes Matt Shakman, the director behind the 2025 movie release The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which is now the most critically-praised and commercially successful of the Fantastic Four movies.
In addition to a Fantastic Four: First Steps sequel already being in development, we’ll see the MCU’s Fantastic Four back in action when Avengers: Doomsday is released on December 18, 2026. Here’s hoping that we hear Chris Columbus’ thoughts on First Steps much sooner than that, as I’m curious to learn if that movie was in any way visually similar to what he envisioned back in 1995.