A new writer has been tapped to pen the planned reboot of Marvel’s Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox. It’s being reported that X-Men: First Class producer Simon Kinberg will now work on the script, and that he’ll also be a producer along with First Class director Matthew Vaughn.

Kinberg has previously written movies like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, X-Men: The Last Stand, Jumper, and Sherlock Holmes. His upcoming credits include X-Men: Days of Future Past, and he’s been said to be working on an unspecified Star Wars movie.

Before Andrew Garfield signed on to play as Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man, Donald Glover was rumored to play as the webslinging hero. That was as close as we got to an actor of color playing a lead character who is normally portrayed as a Caucasian. Now we are a step closer to breaking the comic book color barrier with this latest rumor.

Josh Trank is currently in the casting phase of the Fantastic Four reboot. One of the biggest casting rumors to circulate is that Allison Williams (HBO’s Girls) will play Sue Storm aka The Invisible Woman. Now there is a report from The Wrap indicating that Chronicle star Michael B. Williams could play Johnny Storm, a.k.a. The Human Torch, a character who has long been recognized as white.

Seth Grahame-Smith is a pretty decent writer whose books do really well, but when it comes to screenplays, that’s a whole other story. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the movie he wrote from his novel of the same name, was critically panned and bombed at the box office, but that isn’t stopping the writer from taking on other projects. Heat Vision has word that the screenwriter will be taking his talents to the comic book world now by rewriting the script for the Fantastic Four reboot, directed by Josh Trank.

According to the trade, the new superhero film will take a grounded approach, but have sci-fi elements attached to it. It will also “tap deep into the comics mythology, which featured not just the better-known villains such as Doctor Doom and Galactus but also alien races the Kree and the Skrull, and the anti-matter universe known as the Negative Zone.”

Last we had heard, Chronicle director Josh Trank had come on board to develop Shadow of the Colossus, a movie based on the fantastic PlayStation 2 video game of the same name for Sony.

Now comes word that a writer for the project has been hired in Seth Lochhead. Only one notable credit to his name so far, Lochhead previously wrote Hanna, the movie about a young girl (played by Saoirse Ronan) raised in the wilderness and trained to be a deadly assassin.

Up until last year, 20th Century Fox had been for the better part of the past decade at the receiving end of an unstoppable volley of vitriol over the increasingly shoddy cinematic treatment the studio gave to their three vaunted Marvel Comics properties: Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and Daredevil. Then last summer they released the Matthew Vaughn-directed X-Men: First Class, which earned critical praise and a worldwide gross of more than $350 million – not a bad total considering the movie’s lack of bankable names (unless you count Kevin Bacon) and a coherent marketing strategy. First Class clearly proved that the studio was prepared to follow the example of Marvel Studios in how they develop and execute their superhero blockbusters, attaching talented writers and directors to make the features and making casting decisions not based primarily on demographic appeal.

In addition to the now in-production The Wolverine, Fox has a First Class sequel going before the cameras next year for a summer 2014 release that will be based on the popular and influential Days of Future Past from the original Uncanny X-Men comic series, as well as a reboot of The Fantastic Four happening with Josh Trank, who made his directing debut with this year’s wonderful found-footage superhero movie Chronicle, calling the shots behind the camera. The studio has been attempting to get a new Daredevil movie off the ground for a while now, but long-attached director David Slade (30 Days of Night) departed the project last month. This does not bode well for Fox as their option on the Daredevil character expires on October 10 of this year unless cameras are rolling on the new movie by then.