Why They Don't Let Me Write For Marvel Comics: The Four

I had an idea for a comic book themed serial killer thriller a while back, but I never bothered to pursue it after I realized that I couldn't do it with invented superheroes, and would actually need to reference real comic book characters from the Marvel Universe in a very disturbing context in order to make it work. Not wanting to incur the wrath of a copyright infringement lawsuit from Disney, I forgot about it until now, but I figured I might as well throw it out here, as there doesn't seem to be a better place for it.

The Four

It starts out as a standard police procedural, with two seemingly unrelated murder cases brought together by random chance. It would involve characters from the Marvel Universe, but would not be set in the Marvel Universe, but rather in our world. The first victim, a pilot, was buried alive in liquid concrete until it hardened, then carved out into a vaguely humanoid shape. The second victim, a month later, was a drug addicted extreme sports star who was set on fire and thrown off a building. The first case was thought to be a mob hit, the second possibly a wild drug fueled night gone wrong, until one of the cops at the precinct casually refers to the second as "The Human Torch," sparking the first inkling of a connection.

Later, a mysterious stranger sends an anonymous tip confirming the connection and predicting that the next victim will be either a scientist or a blonde woman. A high profile physicist is kidnapped, leading to a mad dash to find him before he is killed. They get there just too late to find him stretched to death by a Saw like device that pulls apart his bones simultaneously, leaving him hanging from the ceiling with distended limbs. The anonymous tipster reveals himself as a disgraced cop from another city who was fired due to his obsession with a killer no one else believes exists, who creates death scenes based on his favorite comic book superhero teams, and he is now three fourths of the way through his latest work, The Fantastic Four!

 Here we see the killer's previous exploits through the disgraced cop's personal files, starting in one city with the original line up of The Avengers. We see a body builder forcibly injected with a lethal overdose cocktail of steroids and PCP, a Norwegian immigrant electrocuted and smashed in the head with a hammer, A husband and wife sliced apart and stitched back together while still alive into much smaller forms, a wealthy business man smashed to death inside a segmented Iron Maiden, and an ex-solider impaled on an American flag.

Then, in another city, an X-Men motif, with a professor and his daughter murdered, their brains removed and extended out from their bodies, a man burned through the eyes with an industrial laser, another thrown off a building with feathers sewn into his back, another frozen to death, another hung upside down by two acrobatic rings until he died, and finally, a drifter lobotomized and force fed liquid metal.

The climax would follow a tense chase as the lead detective's wife, a blonde statuesque beauty, is kidnapped by the killer, who prepares to make her his Invisible Woman by skinning her alive and replacing her flesh with translucent plastic. That's all I have for the narrative, but I think there should be some clue to the killer's identity through the selection of characters, maybe an indication that there are two killers, a master and an apprentice, the younger of which did the X Men scenes and incorrectly included Wolverine, who wasn't in the original line up.

Naturally, Marvel would never let their characters be used in something like this, so this Se7en-esque movie called Four (or 4our) will never happen. I also toyed with the idea that the killer was a Spiderman fan as a kid, and tried to get Spider powers by jumping into a nest of poisonous arachnids, and now kills out of bitterness for his shattered innocence.

Keven Spacey would be awesome in that shit. I'd watch it.