d2cheer

Yeah they (movie makers) should be able to change anything and it won't matter right?

If people don't like this they are misogynist or something like that right? OR some other term. You have to be if you disagree right? No matter the reason.

Bond Jane Bond OO6.95

I mean people need to just accept it...and shut up about it. No matter that it is an iconic character.

People smarter than us are handling it.

Abob Teff

Trust me, I hate when people jump to that lowest-common-denominator mentality, but that is what the early comments felt like.
I will admit I know very little about the Silver Surfer, but my first thought was not "OMG, woke gender swapping!" but rather, "I guess it is a different character/Silver Surfer." If you are a big Silver Surfer fan and want to express disappointment that your favorite character may not appear, I get that. Screaming and yelling that she's a girl . . . different.

I was with the "Bond can't be Black" crowd for a long time. It doesn't work with the backstory we know of the James Bond we know. I jumped off that wagon though. Since they "actually" killed the character, it shows that not all Bonds are that James Bond. I'm OK with that, so give me the best damned . . . person . . . for the job. (I'm not as on board with a female Bond, but I'm not diametrically opposed.)

Draven

Only comic book nerds could look at an established female comic book character and fly off the handle because they didn't use the established male comic book character instead.

I was never a Silver Surfer fan (I never liked the cosmic Marvel books) but this looks like they are just using another character from the Marvel Universe. And of course this causes a massive freakout

fujishig

But again, this character is not really "a" Silver Surfer except in something like two alternate universe comics. It's more along the lines of, say, making Hermione (or Ron) the "chosen one" in Harry Potter or something, or switching the roles of any two characters in popular fiction (say Spock and Kirk).

Can't wait for heads to be blown if they make her the herald of Galacta, though.

Draven

But she’s an established character in the Marvel Universe. They didn’t switch Norrin Radd’s gender - they just picked the existing female Surfer for this particular story.

It’s like picking a lesser-known Green Lantern over Hal Jordan or Guy Gardner.

fujishig

No it's like picking the one story in Earth-9 where Lois Lane became a Green Lantern, making her THE Green Lantern in the next movie, and saying "see, we took it from the comics." Again I don't care but I can see why some people, maybe even not misogynistic, might. Though most of the rancor is probably from misogynists.

And yes it's a real comic story from the Tangent line: https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Tangent_C...antern_Vol_1_1

Or if you used this as the basis for this Fantastic Four:
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/True_...ers%3F_Vol_1_1

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/What_...c_Four_Vol_1_1

(Although making the versions in Planetary would be kind of awesome)
It's odd because of course comics are the source but they are also work for hire and there are decades of stories from different writers so it's not like there's that much internal consistency like there is when there's one author of a book series. But I think fans are more forgiving if it's a highly though of arc or depiction. Again, just make a good movie and none of this matters. Nobody cared that they changed absolutely everything in their adaptation of Big Hero Six (mostly because nobody cares about Big Hero Six as comic characters, even Marvel)

Hokeyboy

The Fantastic Four has always been my favorite Marvel team since I was a wee turtle, and we've had four movies so far that have failed them entirely (whoda thunk that the cheapass, never-meant-to-actually-be-seen Roger Corman version would be the best of the bunch?)

Female Silver Surfer doesn't bother me. It's the usual Marvel pandering/"woke" move, but as long as there is a Silver Surfer, herald to Galactus, I'm good.

I just want one perfectly iconic FF movie. Like Reeve's Superman, Evans's Captain America, or Maguire's Spider-Man. Those movies perfectly captured their heroes in a way that felt ripped from the comics.

(I'd throw in RDJ as Iron Man but as much as I love the first movie, it was more RDJ than the comics' Iron Man. Still, as a movie it's ranked above Captain America and Spider-Man)

And who knows? Even with Shalla-Bal or whatever, maybe it will still be iconic and in the spirit of Lee/Kirby and the glorious Marvel Silver Age.

But then, given Marvel's output since 2018...

fujishig

It does seem like they'll lean in more to the family/explorer aspect and not just make them straight on superheroes, which hopefully will help.

Josh-da-man

You know, I'm sort of surprised that Marvel never did a What If... Galactus had made Shalla-Bal the Silver Surfer? comic book back in the day. Seems like an idea ripe for the old What If...? series.

Hokeyboy

What If... Jim Shooter's New Universe imprint was a huge success?

fujishig

I might be wrong but I don't think Shalla-Bal was much of a character (besides being one of Norrin Rad's motivations) for a long long time.

Even in the Earth X issue where she's on the cover (as a Silver Surfer) I think she only appears in one panel.

Looking it up, she's actually been in four What If issues, including one where she becomes a different herald after Silver Surfer turned back into Norrin Radd.

Josh-da-man

My issue with the "woke/pandering" thing really just comes down to so many of these properties -- be it Marvel, DC, LOTR, whatever -- is that when they're translated to the screen -- at least for the first time, or at least the first time they're done justice -- I want them to be as close to the originals as possible.

I'll use AMC's Interview with the Vampire series as an example. we got one really solid adaption of that ionic novel with Cruise and Pitt, but not The Vampire Lestat or Queen of the Damned. So it bugs me that AMC has taken the novels and changed so much stuff up before we got proper adaptions of the material. If we're talking second or third or fourth re-interpretations of the material I'm kind of okay with mixing stuff around. Like the controversy over "black James Bond." In that case, the franchise has been around for six decades, it's a cold war artifact from another time, and we've had about thirty movies with six different actors playing the character. It's okay to shake some things up.

But in this case, it's the fourth chance to make the definitive Fantastic Four movie and I really hope they get it right this time. But having Shalla-Bal be the Silver Surfer makes it feel like an old issue of What If? and it makes me a little nervous that they're going to churn out another mess like the Fox movies.

Josh-da-man

* Jim Shooter doesn't get fired.
* Carol Kalish still drops dead.
* Valiant Comics never happens, killing the speculator boom/bust of the 90s.
* Marvel Comics editorial maintains creative control of the comics and the clusterfuck of 90s Marvel Comics never happens.
* Claremont stays on the X-Men.
* Marvel doesn't overextend its line of comics to bankruptcy or buy Heroes World.
* Marvel doesn't shitty deals to sell off the rights to the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Hulk, or Spiderman to Fox and Universal for cheap and forever.
* Half of the writers and artists at Marvel still hate Shooter's guts but continue to work there anyway.

fujishig

Plus I'd have retired now off of my copies of Star Brand, Psi Force, D.P. 7, Justice, Spitfire, Nightmask, etc. 1st printings.

Hokeyboy

On the DC side, they still get the John Byrnes, Doug Moenches, Frank Millers, Alan Moores, etc. (that fled from Shooter's micromanagement and editorial mandates) which still gave way to the post-Crisis Boom and emergence of Vertigo.

Does Image still happen? Does fate eventually catch up with Shooter and maybe he gets booted 5 years later, taking the "new talent" with him to start Defiant with the likes of Macfarlane, Liefeld, Lee, etc?

The world may never know... and probably shouldn't. Rob Liefeld's "Blood Plasm"...

fujishig

The Image guys don't follow Shooter unless he gives them rights over their own creations, and even then part of the founding of Image was not being told by editorial what to do, which is Shooter's whole thing.

Josh-da-man

The thing about the Image guys is that with Shooter at the helm, we probably wouldn't have seen vanity titles like McFarlane's Spiderman, Lee's X-Men, and Liefeld's X-Force that shot them into the superstar stratosphere and gave them leverage to create Image Comics in the first place.

They were already massively popular, but those titles and the push Marvel gave them turned them into fucking rockstars. A few of those guys might have jumped to DC or something, but I doubt Shooter would ever have let the creators become bigger than the properties they were working on. Look at Valiant, and how it the creatives were either new talent or journeyman creators.

Even their 80s heydays, I really doubt that guys like Miller, Byrne, Perez, and Simonson could have left Marvel and DC and started their own Image Comics with the same success. (A few years later, Miller and Byrne tried to create their own imprint at Dark Horse called "Legend" but it fell apart in short order, but did give the world Hellboy.)

Draven

I hate the term "woke" because it's usually followed by "why can't it just be white guys?" We have enough movies.

It may be as simple as looking at the Fantastic Four, you've got three men and one woman, so they picked the female version of another prominent character instead of the male. And that's an okay reason - because if we have to be beholden to stuff that was started in the 1960s, it's just going to be a bunch of white dudes running around and if there is a female character or someone of color, they are probably a stereotype.

fujishig

Again, though, this is barely a version of a character. This is not choosing between, say, Hal Jordan or John Stewart for GL, this is choosing Lois Lane to be Superman instead. Maybe this is obvious but it seems like most people going "well, they chose a female character instead, what's the fuss" are missing this subtlety (mainly because hey, it's a naked silver person an a surfboard, not Superman)

Also going back to the Valiant/Shooter tangent, hey, Barry Windsor Smith was no journeyman! (could probably argue that for Bob Layton too)

Josh-da-man

Yeah, but we're kind of stuck with it. Especially when discussing criticism of these kinds of casting/creative choices.

Yeah, that's one reason Jackson swapped Arwen for Glorfindel in Fellowship of the Ring. The story, as written by Tolkien, was a sausage fest, and by bringing in Arwen they got to include another female character, develop Aragorn more, and remove a one-and-done character in an already crowded cast.

And, in that case, it worked spectacularly. Whereas doing something like replacing Legolas in the Fellowship with her might have been a bridge too far and not have worked so well.

cultshock

I honestly didn't remember the name at all. I recall Norrin Radd having a wife but that's it, I don't think I read any Marvel comics in the 1970s or 80s that involved her.

rocket1312

It's pretty obvious the decision was made to cast a woman in the role first and then Marvel grafted Shalla Bal to the concept so they could justify her as having precedent in the comics. It's not like anyone ever started from the place of "Hey, wouldn't it be great if we could do a Shalla Bal story in the MCU?" We can speculate as to why the choice was made, but I'm sure it was some combination of "There aren't enough women in the cast" and "We already saw silver surfer in a movie so let's do something different." I get that there's likely some degree of misogyny in the discourse, but I don't think it's a bridge too far to understand why fans might be (in good faith) disappointed with the choice. Ultimately I think there's a whole lot of straw men on both sides of the conversation, but hey, that's life in 2024.

B5Erik

I don't see why some people are having such a hard time understanding that.

It's such a fundamental change that it's a slap in the face to fans of the character.

cultshock

Agreed.

PhantomStranger

What's funny is that Fox pulled off a pretty cool Silver Surfer in their Fantastic Four 2 movie. They even got Laurence Fishbourne to voice him, who was awesome in the role. Yes, I like that movie mostly for Silver Surfer's role.

Can't wait to see what crazy gender flips and fourth-string characters they'll use for their X-Men.