Fantastic Four: Why Marvel has spent 31 years struggling to make a good movie.

In 1994’s The Fantastic Four , the first movie to portray one of Marvel Comics’ flagship superhero teams on film, disaster strikes when the brilliant college student Reed Richards (Alex Hyde-White) and his equally brilliant classmate Victor Von Doom (Joseph Culp) rush to capture the celestial energy of a comet that passes Earth only once every 10 years. The movie, like Reed and Victor’s experiment, was an utter disaster, so bad that the president of Marvel Studios, according to most accounts, paid the producers not to release it. But like that fateful comet, and on roughly the same schedule, the Fantastic Four have kept coming back, and the results have not been much better.

Given that the Fantastic Four were the first superteam created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby—nearly two years before