Well, well, well. Look who came back to 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. News hits that the MCU could be taking some unorthodox swings with the Silver Surfer in their upcoming Fantastic Four adaptation, and all of a sudden you come crawling back.
You probably feel pretty silly right now, don’t you? Thinking back to 16 years ago, when you and your little buddies got such a big kick out of making fun of Tim Story’s sequel to a 2005 origin story that Keith Phipps of The AV Club called “a garish mediocrity.” Oh how you laughed, conspiring to give Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer a 38% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. You threw your little Rise of the Silver Surfer-hating parties and served your little canapés and played party games like “spot the holes in Michael Chiklis’s costume” and “Try to pronounce Ioan Gruffudd.”
And now look at you: Hat in hand, gazing longingly back at the good old days when Brian Posehn still counted as a celebrity cameo. You’d love to watch Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer now, wouldn’t you? Well guess what? You can’t.
Now don’t you feel terrible?
Not unless you have a Disney Plus subscription. That’s where it’s streaming: Disney Plus. It’s part of the “Marvel Legacy” collection, the service’s corner for naughty little properties like X-Men that didn’t wait for the MCU to exist before they started turning into blockbusters. The lineup is pretty fluid, and tends to change depending on which streamers are interested in renting out older properties for a month or two, but Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer has been a fairly regular “Marvel Legacy” entry, and it’s available there as we speak. If we’re being totally honest, we were being pretty dramatic earlier when we said that you couldn’t watch it. You can also rent Rise of the Silver Surfer on most video platforms for around four fantastic dollars.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer picks up where the first movie left off, with Reed Richards and Sue Storm trying desperately to get married. Their blessed day is interrupted by the herald of the world-eater Galactus, and the promised destruction of Earth, where the Fantastic Four live. The film sees the five leads from the first movie returning to their original roles, with Stan Lee abandoning the part of Willie Lumpkins in favor of playing obscure Marvel character Stan Lee.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to revisit the 2015 reboot, Fant4stic, it can be viewed in the common area of the prison the next time you’re incarcerated for a string of deranged crimes, you monster.