Jon Watts, the director of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy, was once set to bring us The Fantastic Four: First Steps as well — and who wouldn’t want that, after his excellent job with our favorite webbed hero? Well, Watts himself, it turns out. The filmmaker opened up about his departure from the project for the first time, revealing he was simply too “out of gas” after working on Spidey, both on set and in post, through the pandemic to take it on.
“The emotional strain of having to go through all of those COVID protocols while also trying to make something creative while also trying to make sure that your cast and crew were all safe — literally, people could’ve died if you did things wrong — that and the post-production process was very difficult,” Watts revealed at the Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta recently while participating in a storytelling masterclass on June 26.
“When you’re doing [visual effects work],” he continued. “There’s a whole international component to it where you’re using vendors from all over the world, and the supply chain had been interrupted because of COVID. It was really hard to get effects done in a traditional way.”
The filmmaker, who was a producer on and has a story credit for the recent hit Final Destination: Bloodlines, originally committed to working on First Steps between the second Spidey film, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and the third, Spider-Man: No Way Home. But when it came time to shift gears and get into pre-production mode, he realized he was “out of gas.”
“The COVID layer on top of making a giant movie layer, I knew I didn’t have what it would’ve taken to make that movie great,” he continued during the discussion. “I was just out of steam, so I just needed to take some time to recover. Everyone at Marvel totally understood. They had been through it with me as well, so they knew how hard and draining that experience has been; in the end, very satisfying, but at some point, if you can’t do it at the level that you feel like you need to for it to be great, then it’s better to not do it.”
Watts did note that he’s excited to see what director Matt Shakman and the cast and crew have pulled together for their version of the story, but that “it’s going to be [a] totally surreal experience for me to go and watch that movie.”
The Fantastic Four: First Steps — which stars Pedro Pascal, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ralph Ineson — will arrive in theaters on July 25.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
