John Malkovich Officially Cut From The Fantastic Four: First Steps; Character Is Revealed

It’s official – after weeks of rumblings that he was potentially going to be cut from the film, The Fantastic Four: First Steps director has confirmed that John Malkovich has been cut from the film, due for release next week, via Variety.

The actor was also confirmed to be playing Ivan Kragoff, aka The Red Ghost, a villain who appeared very early in the burgeoning comics. Director Matt Shakman confirmed this to the site, as well as some other tidbits about the film. John Malkovich and his scenes were part of a “lengthy sequence” that detailed the Fab Four’s early years as superheroes and would have seen them pitted against Red Ghost and his Super-Apes.

We got a glimpse of him in the film’s first teaser trailer but then nothing was shown since, and rumours that his name disappeared from the film credits on some websites caused fans to speculate about his possible absence. Shakman said the actor “was brilliant in it, and gave it his all.”

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“There were a lot of things that ultimately ended up hitting the cutting room floor,” Shakman said. “When we were building a ’60s retro-future world, introducing all of these villains, introducing these four main characters as a group, as well as individually, introducing the idea of a child — there was a lot of stuff to balance in this movie and some things had to go ultimately in terms of shaping the film for its final version.”

“It was heartbreaking not to include him in the final version of the movie because he’s one of my very favorite humans and one of my biggest inspirations,” the director added. “As a person who walks the line between theater and film and television, there’s no one who is more inspiring than the founder of Steppenwolf Theater Company. What he’s done on stage as an actor and what he’s done as a director in theater as well as in film, and as just a film actor of incredible ability — I was honored he came to play.”

The Fantastic Four: First Steps opens in UK cinemas on July 25th.

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Scott J. Davis

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Editor of The People's Movies for a year and a half, Scott has over 13 years of experience as a film writer and critic, writing for such sites as Digital Spy, Sci-Fi Now, Yahoo Movies UK, Flickering Myth, and more. He is also a retired interviewer and red carpet reporter for HeyUGuys since 2016, where he has attended hundreds of junkets and premieres, interviewing a range of talent from Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Jennifer Lawrence, Samuel L. Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Martin Scorsese, Jim Carrey, Emily Blunt and many more.

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