In a move the reeks of opportunism and greed, Jack Kirby’s Estate (a.k.a. his family) have hired Intellectual Property Lawyer Marc Toberoff to sue Disney/Marvel, Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures in an attempt to reclaim copyright ownership of the characters their late father Jacob Kurtzberg created. You may know his name better as Jack Kirby and you are most familiar with his iconic and highly popular comic book creations, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk and The Silver Surfer.

Thanks to the guys over /Film for sharing this with us and to Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool and Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywod who seem to have gotten the drop on this breaking news. This is not the first lawsuit we’ve seen involving a comic book creator’s estate vs. the current owner and publisher; Just recently we reported and discussed WB/DC’s fight with the heirs of Jerry Siegel and Jerry Schuster over the rights to Superman.

Ok so I had to redo this intro because as I was writing this MTV Splash Page happened to post (a day earlier than usual) their weekly fantasy casting column about…the Fantastic Four. My goal was to get this up today and scoop the usual Friday, blogosphere speculation fest… but C’est la vie.

Thankfully for me, Splash Page cast their Fantastic Four flick using a mostly older set of actors; I myself have been envisioning a more youthful (not too young, though) version of Fantastic Four. Check out what my vision for this upcoming reboot is, and who I picked to take on the roles of Marvel’s favorite superhero family.

Back in March of this year, we reported on the possible reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise. Then, at the end of last month that rumor became a fact, as 20th Century Fox is, indeed, moving forward with a reboot of Fantastic Four.

As Screen Rant’s Kofi Outlaw predicted back in March, a reboot should and will mean that the four actors who portrayed the titular superheroes in Fantastic Four and its sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer, will be recast. Although it’s not been talked about/confirmed for Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd or Michael Chiklis, today we get word that Chris Evans won’t be playing The Human Torch again in Fox’s Fantasic Four reboot.

You know what’s great about superhero movies? If you don’t like one, wait a year or two and you’ll probably get a reboot. Back in March, Screen Rant reported that Fox was considering rebooting their financially successful (but critically panned) Fantastic Four franchise. Now we have confirmation. According to Variety, the Fantastic Four reboot will be produced by Akiva Goldsman (Jonah Hex and Hancock) and written by Michael Green (co-executive producer of Heroes and co-writer of Green Lantern).

When we first heard whispers of this reboot from IESB, the word on the block was that a reboot would be “darker.” Big surprise, right? Every superhero movie wants to get “darker” right now. Of course, darker is a relative term. As it stands, there’s “dark, but fun” (Iron Man) or “just plain dark” (The Dark Knight). I’m betting that Fantastic Four will be more like the former.

To quote the late Queen of Blues, Dinah Washington, “What a Difference a Day Makes.” Just recently all anyone was talking about in the movie industry was whether The Final Destination was in indeed final and if Rob Zombie was done butchering horror films (to answer that last question, NO, he’s trying to tackle The Blob next – and I’m not referring to my first girlfriend from high school). But here we are, just a scant twenty-four hours later and the biggest fish in the marketing sea has just eaten the biggest fish in the comic book sea.

Of course, I’m talking about the news that Walt Disney Co. acquired Marvel Comics, Inc. for the meager sum of $4 billion dollars. It’s a great deal of money, and I don’t care what the nay-sayers out there gripe about, if I owned a prospering business and a mega-company offered to buy me out for an exuberant amount of money, I’d sell too. Heck, I’d go buy a special pen just to sign the papers! Anyone who says otherwise just isn’t being honest with themselves.

As you may already know, Fox and Marvel want to reboot both the Fantastic Four and Daredevil and it looks like a certain “Starbuck” may be angling to play none other than Typhoid Mary!

Recently, Katee Sackhoff (”Starbuck” on Battlestar Galactica) was seen at Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles purchasing as many comics featuring Typhoid Mary as possible. Now of course there’s no guarantee that she’ll be playing the pyrokinetic villain, or is even being considered, but it’s a darn good bet she wants to play her!

(Unverified) rumors are starting to fly about 20th Century Fox (possibly) retooling and rebooting their Fantastic Four franchise.

The previous two Fantastic Four films earned a combined total of over half a billion dollars at the box office, but never really succeeded in connecting with critics or fanboys alike.

So, is critical praise and fanboy adoration really worth so much to Fox that they would re-launch the entire Fantastic Four franchise? As the Zen master said, “We shall see…”

With the popularity of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, I thought I’d highlight a related collectible. Sideshow Collectibles is running out of these 1/4 scale maquettes of the Ben Grimm/Thing character so you might want to check ‘em out and maybe grab one for yourself. It’s a big piece, standing 16″ tall, and this detailed, lifelike solid polystone maquette was used as the control design model for the fabrication and sculpture for the full sized suit seen in the first film.

When reviewing movies, I form my own opinion – but one of my favorite websites for helping me decide whether or not to go see a movie is RottenTomatoes.com. I really like the “consensus” approach they use in determining whether or not a movie is good or bad in a general sense.

If you’re not familiar with the site, it gathers reviews from across the web and based on the ratings of individual reviews determines whether the movie gets a ripe or rotten tomato. 60% and above overall positive reviews garners a film a ripe tomato, indicating that it’s a good flick according to the majority. Anything under that gets a rotten tomato. My experience is that anything down to about 50% can be a pretty good bet depending on the genre and your personal tastes, although the lower you go the more likely you won’t like a movie no matter what.

Up until this past week I’ve almost always been in agreement with the overall consensus, but I think the majority of reviewers out there really need to lighten up based on the ratings for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Holee crap… it seems like every other day another three movie clips and 24 new images come out for either Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer or Transformers.

I refuse to post another video clip or new image from either of these upcoming films here at Screen Rant. Seriously, just how much of these movies do you want to see before you ever set foot in the stinking movie theater?!? I understand the concept of the Hollywood Hype Machine and it’s ever increasing need to beat the last box office record (most money made on a 3.5 day weekend in an odd numbered month during the summer solstice, for example).

Is the pendulum finally swinging the other way? For the longest time action movies pushed the PG-13 envelope, doing razor thin trims until they just barely escaped the R-rating and slid in to theaters as PG-13 for those lucrative teen and preteen dollars.

Now I hear from /Film that Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer has gotten a PG rating! I did not expect that at all… I had assumed it was a given that it would get a PG-13. Very surprising as far as I’m concerned.

So it’s almost here. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (don’t you love super-long movie titles?) opens on June 15th and the marketing blitz is in high gear. It almost seemed like 20th Century Fox bought up all the advertising time on the season finale of Heroes to pitch this sequel. Is it possible that the sequel could be better than the original?

The final trailer for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is out and it’s much more impressive than the original teaser trailer that was released a while back.

One of the complaints about the first Fantastic Four movie was the fact that Ben Grimm as The Thing did not have his trademark big honkin’ brow ridge.

Based on the photo on the left it looks like the folks making the movie heard that and fixed that particular issue in Rise of the Silver Surfer. The first image is from the first film and the second image is from the sequel.

At least it looks like they’re going to do one thing right in the upcoming film.

Ain’t It Cool News has always been a huge movie site, with it’s founder Harry Knowles becoming a bit of a celebrity among the geek fanboy movie crowd (don’t be offended, I’m IN that crowd). Like many movie websites out there (including this one) they report rumors based on information sent to them, but usually their sources are pretty solid.

However right now they’re getting pretty hammered in regards to recent reports about Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Wow, this has got to be the most interesting story I’ve read so far today. On the heels of some very bad preview reactions to Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, comes the news from AICN that Galactus will appear in the form of:

A giant cloud.

The big news this week is supposedly that Laurence Fishburne may be doing the voice of Galactus, but I think that this tidbit from Ainitcoolnews is a lot more newsworthy: There was a screening of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer a couple of days ago and the reaction was, to put it mildly, not good.

The specific quote that was sent to AICN was:

It seems that a previous quote by Ioan Gruffudd (who plays Mr. Fantastic) stating that Galactus would not be appearing in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer seems to have been incorrect. Whether this was by design or ignorance, I don’t know. Considering that the Silver Surfer is the herald of Galactus, it seemed odd to me that the big guy wouldn’t be in the film… especially with the sound bite in the latest commercial where they say that eight days after the Silver Surfer shows up on a world, it’s destroyed.

But today, posted on Tim Story’s Myspace blog:

So the quicktime versions of the Fantastic Four 2 trailer are out (or Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer if you’re feeling more dramatic). I’m pretty sure that at the least it will be better than the first FF movie, but as I read elsewhere, that wouldn’t take much.

At first glance it was pretty cool… I always enjoy watching Johnny Storm in flying sequences, and his admiration at the Silver Surfer’s ability to go through solid matter was fun. However the ridiculousness of Johnny being able to keep up with and even catch the Silver Surfer seemed a bit silly to me. SS travels through space at what one would assume hyperlight velocities, yet this guy who’s made of fire can catch him? Unless the Surfer was just in the mood for a game of cat and mouse, that seemed pretty dumb to me.