The Fantastic Four reboot, stylized as Fant4stic, was so poorly received that Marvel killed the entire team in a Punisher comic. Punisher Vol. 10 #12 depicts the main actors of the film dying in a gratuitous explosion. This shocking comic would not be the only way that Disney and Marvel's MCU distanced themselves from the film - and from the entire Fantastic Four franchise.
Directed by Josh Trank, 2015's Fant4stic was meant to serve as a darker reboot of the two Fantastic Four franchise. 21st Century Fox, eager to start production lest the film rights revert to Marvel, hired the relative newcomer Trank in the hopes that he would be easy for executives to control. Last-minute budget cuts, erratic behavior from Trank on-set, and eleventh-hour studio-mandated reshoots resulted in the film pulling in a measly $51 million domestic against a $155 million budget. Overwhelmingly negative reviews didn't help. As much as audiences and critics didn't like it though, no one seemed to hate the film more than Marvel themselves.
Punisher Vol. 10 #12 from writer Nathan Edmondson and artist Mitch Gerads, begins with three characters in a Los Angeles highrise who look suspiciously like Miles Teller, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell; all of them are waiting for a character named "Mike" (a reference to Michael B. Jordan). "Does Mike think this movie is all about Johnny?" asks the Jamie Bell lookalike (who wears the Fantastic Four "4" logo on his shirt, just to drive the point home), and another wonders if Mike knows that "Trang" is directing a sequel. All the lookalikes then see smoke and fire in the distance. Before any of them can react, the three are engulfed in a massive explosion that kills them all.
Not satisfied with killing the actors, Marvel decided to kill the entire comic as well: the long-running Fantastic Four comic was canceled in 2014 out of Marvel's desire to dissociate themselves from everything Fox-related. Ostensibly the reasoning behind the cancellation was low sales, but it was an open secret that Ike Perlmutter directed Marvel to cancel the comic in the wake of Fant4stic's bad publicity. This was not without precedent: Marvel had been downplaying the role of the X-Men in comics ever since the rise of Fox's X-Men film series and attempted to replace them with the Inhumans. With the acquisition of multiple Fox properties by Disney in a landmark $71.3 billion deal in 2019, the Inhumans were no longer needed and were once more relegated to the C-list.
The Fant4stic cast dying in an explosion, even as a joke, reveals just how intertwined comics and films have become. It's no secret that popularity drives sales, but Punisher Vol. 10 #12 and Marvel's fleeting Inhumans push proves that companies can be just as vindictive and petty as individuals. Now that Marvel has resumed publication of the Fantastic Four comic, fans can hope for a more entertaining MCU film - and perhaps one that won't' necessitate murdering the actors as a cheap joke.