Jeez-Louise, 20th Century Fox, you are not doing so hot these days. First comes word that you had the lowest box office totals for summer 2008; next furious fanboys worldwide want to rip you a new one over your Watchmen lawsuit; and now some acclaimed directors are beginning to speak out about what a soul-crushing, creatively stifling cabal of evil your company truly is.

Babylon A.D. director Mathieu Kassovitz had no qualms about pointing the finger at executive meddling as the reason his film sucks. And now acclaimed director Alex Proyas is throwing up the finger (so to speak) in Fox’s face–and his displeasure is a veritable death sentence for what might have been one of the coolest comic book movie adaptations of all: The Silver Surfer.

It’s way, WAY early but Tim Story, director of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer stated recently that they didn’t show more of Galactus in the film because they wanted to save him for the stand alone Silver Surfer movie.

Tim Story said the following regarding the devourer of worlds:

“We decided early on that we would not bring him to life completely as you might think of him in the comics, being a man with the suit and the helmet and everything else,” Story said during his commentary. One of the main reasons is because we always knew that there was going to be a Silver Surfer 1, or they were going to make a spin-off of the Silver Surfer. If I gave up everything in this movie, then that movie wouldn’t have much to go on. Knowing that I wasn’t going to do it that early, I wanted to keep it fairly open to interpretation by the director who would do that one. So the idea of the cloud and everything made pretty good sense to us.”

Holy cow, Marvel is planning on releasing a TON of superhero movies. Will they all be great? Not likely… I’m sure they’ll have some Ghost Riders in there, but on the other hand they may strike gold with some depending on who is writing and directing.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s in the pipeline beyond what’s already currently in production: Wolverine, Magneto, Punisher 2, Silver Surfer, Sub-Mariner, Thor, Avengers (maybe) and Captain America. Whew!