Here’s The Thing About FANTASTIC FOUR’s The Thing

This is the third live action iteration of Fantastic Four's The Thing, and so far none of them have really been right. They've been varying degrees of faithful - the Corman one looking the most like the popular conception of The Thing, and also looking the worst - but none have been right. Including the new one from Josh Trank's Fantastic Four, who looks sort of like Clayface maybe. Empire has given us the first good look at him, above.

I've thought about why this is and I've decided it's because The Thing is a cartoon character. Not a comic character, a cartoon character. His facial dimensions and shape are so exagerrated that they go from illustration to traditional cartooning, a face that is more representative than realistic. And nobody is willing to go there in the movies - they need The Thing to look like a dude who has been transformed into rock as opposed to a dude who has become a walking cartoon character. The eyebrows, so expressive in the comics, are never right. The jaw, so broad and exagerrated in the comics, is always normal. 

It's possible that we're simply never going to get The Thing right. Maybe there are CGI tests of a more comic book-y thing that will show up on the Fantastic Four DVD and we'll understand that even that wouldn't work, and that the character is, in a very primal way, unadaptable to the big screen.