Josh Trank is back. Well, not yet, but his next film, “Capone,” is set to be released next week and that means the director will have a new project to talk about, hopefully leading to discussions that don’t revolve around his last feature, “Fantastic Four.” That superhero film, released in 2015, not only was a critical and financial disaster for Fox but also led to some incredibly public combative comments from Trank towards the studio system and the cut of the film that was released. However, now, five years later, the director is opening up about his work on that film. And as you might have guessed, “Fantastic Four” wasn’t a great moment in Josh Trank’s life.
Speaking to Polygon, the filmmaker talked about taking the Marvel film right after the release of “Chronicle” and at a time when all the studios were anxiously courting him. And after all that, Trank chose to do a reboot of “Fantastic Four.” But not in the way that fans might have hoped.
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“The first ‘Avengers’ movie had recently come out, and I kept saying, ‘That should be our template, that’s what audiences want to see!” ‘FF’ co-writer Jeremy Slater said. “And Josh just fucking hated every second of it.”
This led to Trank crafting a much more somber, morose superhero film, despite the studio not being keen on the idea of the fun-loving “Fantastic Four” brand being turned into some sort of body-horror franchise. And when fans on social media started questioning the tone of the film, apparently Fox decided to change things up.
“They really do pay attention to what people are saying on Twitter. They look at that and they say, ‘Shit, people are freaked out about how it’s not going to be funny. So we need to spend $10 million to do a comedy rewrite,’” said Trank.
What this all led to is Fox hiring editor Stephen Rivkin to save the film, editing a new version of what Trank had already shot, and creating a tone that Fox would springboard off of during reshoots.
And while Trank was still on set during the new reshoots, he admits to not having much control at all and had no say into what the new script for the reshoots looked like.
“It was like being castrated,” he said. “You’re standing there, and you’re basically watching producers blocking out scenes, five minutes ahead of when you get there, having [editors hired] by the studio deciding the sequence of shots that are going to construct whatever is going on, and what it is that they need. And then, because they know you’re being nice, they’ll sort of be nice to you by saying, ‘Well, does that sound good?’ You can say yes or no.”
Obviously, when the film was released, any hope that Fox had that the reshoots and re-edits would draw the audience to theaters was shot down and “Fantastic Four” became one of the biggest superhero bombs of all time. Any thoughts of a sequel were quickly dashed.
However, Trank did reveal that early on during the development of his version of “Fantastic Four,” if Fox hadn’t interfered, he knew exactly where the sequel would have gone.
“The end of the ‘Fantastic Four’ was going to very organically set up the adventure and the weirdness and the fun,” he said. “That would be the wish fulfillment of the sequel. Because obviously, the sequel would be, ‘OK, now we are [superpowered] forever and it’s weird and funny and there’s adventure lurking around every corner.’ But the first movie was going to basically be the filmic version of how I saw myself all the time: the metaphor of these characters crawling out of hell.”
Perhaps in another parallel universe, where Trank got to release his version of the film, this sequel exists. However, here, not so much.
