Would this really have damaged the Marvel/FF brand? Was Avi Arad wrong?

I mean, it seems a little too easy to say this since the Fantastic Four have gone on to have a box office bomb and now don't even have a currently-running comic book.

Now, given what I've heard about Avi Arad, I would believe he'd cancel a movie and destroy it just because he'd be short sighted enough to believe it'd damage brand image.

This is the same guy who would, 13 years later, force Sam Raimi to shoehorn Venom into Spider-Man 3 and then ignore Kevin Feige's advice six years after that, spurning any ideas of bringing "The Amazing Spider-Man" series to the MCU. (Apparently, before the second one, Marvel was open to merging that series into the MCU.)

This movie is not perfect at all. There's a problem of the actors not being able to polish their performances, the script definitely didn't get a good polish, and of course, the production values are low. But there's a real palpable feeling that the cast and crew wants to bring these characters to life that I think makes the film bearable. And who knows? Might've brought in a good number of audiences back in 1994.

So, what do you think? Should Avi Arad have stayed out of the picture and let them do their thing?

What we see and what we seem are but a dream. A dream within a dream.