Unfortunately, You Watched ‘Fantastic Four’ The Wrong Way This Weekend

Fantastic Four has great critic and audience reviews, and had a solid opening weekend of $218 million, already passing up its reported budget. While you may have enjoyed watching the movie this weekend, there is a 97% chance you…did it wrong. Mild spoilers follow.

It was not widely broadcast, but this is a film that you should have watched in IMAX, similar to how a movie like Sinners was recently bolstered by that kind of release. The movie was in fact shot in IMAX, but past that, Fantastic Four: First Steps had a filming decision by Matt Shakman that was rather cool. Any time you saw Galactus, the film switched to the “square” 1.43:1 format, as opposed to 1.90:1 which is the IMAX format the rest of the movie is shot in.

To his credit, Shakman did say this was happening before release, but if you did not see that out of the hundreds of interviews he and the cast gave, I wouldn’t blame you. He had an interview to IMAX about the process and while he said he didn’t want to “ruin” when that happened, it came out before the movie aired anyway.

Again, most fans did not realize this until after the fact, and social media has now been filled with images of what viewers were “missing” if they did not see the movie or its Galactus parts in IMAX:

These tweets have racked up hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of views in some instances, so perhaps word of mouth may spread that this is the “best” way to view the movie. Even doing this for a living, I didn’t realize that this was the case. Not that the film looked bad by any means in a normal theater, visually (it’s one of the best Marvel has done in a while), but this still would have been cool to see. I really, really loved Sinners switching to 1.90:1 during its biggest scenes, and this would have been a neat way to bolster the sheer size of Galactus.

Speaking of the sheer size of Galactus, what exactly happens to his giant world-eating ship that’s just hanging out in orbit without him or even Silver Surfer around to pilot it? I’m guess Reed can figure out some way to repurpose it. That, or a more nefarious force whom we may be seeing rather soon…

In any case, if you haven’t seen Fantastic Four yet, you should probably find your local IMAX theater to do so.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.