>Josh Trank was the obvious candidate to reinvigorate the Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox. In the mid-2000s, a pair of lighthearted films led by Jessica Alba and Chris Evans failed to break through in a zeitgeist captured by Christopher Nolan’s gritty reinvention of Batman. Fox hoped that a modern sensibility could take the property in a new direction. Trank voiced his interest, and though Fox executives offered him the chance to pursue something original, the Marvel movie “felt like the most rebellious thing to do,” the director said. His take on the material made him confident. A company buying into his hype made him bullheaded. Fox didn’t want to make another Fantastic Four movie — it wanted to make Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four movie.
>Trank's first move was to hire his friend Jeremy Slater as his writer. "There wasn’t really any sort of traditional pitching process,” Slater said of his first days on the film. "Josh just said, ‘Jeremy is writing it for me,’ and Fox nervously said, ‘Uhh ... sure.'" They began work in the spring of 2012.
>Trank came to Slater with a skeleton idea: His Fantastic Four would be the opposite of every other franchise kickoff. “The end of the Fantastic Four was going to very organically set up the adventure and the weirdness and the fun. 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."
>Developing the script was a clamer. Slater was a badge-carrying nerd ready to convert comic book lore into bombastic, CG-ready setpieces. Trank was the opposite, having only seen a few episodes of the cartoon from the mid-90's and having a general distaste for comic book movies. “The first Avengers movie had recently come out, and I kept saying, ‘That should be our template, that’s what audiences want to see!” Slater said. “And Josh just fucking hated every second of it.”
>"The trials of developing Fantastic Four had everything to do with tone," Trank said. "You could take the most comic booky things, as far as just names and faces and identities and backstories, and synthesize it into a tone. And the tone that Slater was interested in was not a tone that I felt I had anything in common with."
>In an effort to creatively engage his director by any means necessary, Slater loaded Trank up with comics from his personal collection — the greatest Doctor Doom stories, his favorite Ben Grimm moments — but nothing sparked. Trank was more interested in the early moments, digging into Reed Richards’ character development and traumatic childhood and transformation. Once the team got its powers, that’s where it started losing Trank. Galactus, Annihilus, Herbie the Robot, time travel, multiple dimensions, old teams fighting young teams — everything was on the table, and any sequence or character could get tossed out at a moment’s notice.
>“It didn’t matter if they were fighting robots in Latveria or aliens in the Negative Zone or Mole Monsters in downtown Manhattan", said Slater "Josh just did not give a shit."
>"I feel like I get Mole Man," Trank said in his defense. "He’s angry and undermined by the system."
>Slater wrote nearly 18 drafts and 2,000 pages of material during his time on FANTASTIC FOUR. Only two of those drafts made it to the studio. In an effort to retain control, Trank acted as the messenger between Fox and Slater, leaving certain studio notes out of their conversations, and only delivering certain drafts to the studio for feedback. “Right from the start of the process, Josh told me I wasn’t allowed to speak with Fox without him present,” Slater said. “I never saw 95% of those notes.”
>Slater departed FANTASTIC FOUR after six months and, in typical blockbuster fashion, a handful of Fox-approved screenwriters came on board to knock the script into shootable shape. Simon Kinberg, who had proved himself to Fox by guiding the X-MEN franchise with Bryan Singer, would stick around to see the entire production through. The two worked well enough together, but as the beginning of production crept closer and closer, and a hard release date hovered over the entire operation, the project moved forward in less than desirable fashion. The script didn’t have a third act, and life was compounding the intensity of the situation for Trank.
>Trank faced immense pressure as he worked on the movie. The director came from behind, and was suddenly in charge of something that everyone expected to be a huge success. "That requires a degree of experience that we often underestimate," one source close to the production said.
>Trank took bold swings where he could. Early on, he insisted to Fox that Michael B. Jordan was the guy to play Johnny Storm, a character traditionally depicted as white. “For the world I grew up in, a racially intense Los Angeles where we were used to seeing white superheroes, some of my friends who were black should have seen a black superhero, so I felt that while being in a position of power, I could change the system a little bit.” Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, and Kate Mara rounded the cast.
Why is it THIS movie that constantly keeps getting brought up like hepatitis? There's tons of other comicbook films that came before and after it that are equally if not more worse.
Jacob Parker
He is. Remember that time he came here to shill his movie? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Bentley Rivera
Wait, really? How did he get found out? That's fucking fascinating.
Ian White
Don't remember, but I'm sure somebody can find it in the archive. It was fucking embarrassing.
Christian Baker
>In pre-production, Trank clashed with his team of pre-vis artists over the flavor of the movie’s action scenes, despite them all being trained in the art of alien invasion choreography. Likewise, on set, not everyone had the time or interest in hearing from the guy who made one pretty good movie.
>“In a studio scenario, you’re basically being surrounded by veterans who are going to do a hell of a job doing exactly what it is that they do,” Trank said. “Because it’s not your movie. You didn’t come up with it. You didn’t create these characters. You didn’t create this property. This guy was fucking nominated for Oscars. This guy has fucking made 20 movies with Robert Zemeckis. It’s a fucking science-fiction adventure movie. What the fuck do you need to tell them other than the direction of the agreement between you and the studio? All Zemeckis’ production designer needs to know is whether this is the take, yes or no.” Of course, that type of “yes” or “no” still needed producer and studio approval. “I was aware of the protocol, but I wasn’t really asking.”
>FANTASTIC FOUR was filmed over the summer of 2014. Trank did not recall receiving a complaint from the studio during the 72-day shoot, and refuted most of the tiny grievances that came out after the fact. Teller’s alleged "I’m-a-movie-star-now" approach to acting, which involved questioning even the most low-impact performance requests, caught him off-guard, but a tussle that “nearly became physical,” according to an Entertainment Weekly story from August 2015, was a moment of miscommunication between two Type-A personalities. As for The Hollywood Reporter piece that suggested “he built a black tent around his monitor” and “cut himself off from everybody,” Trank said that was a traditional video village, and sometimes “you can’t actually be out standing next to the camera because the camera’s on a fucking dolly.”
>Trank, who has never been one to unplug, picked up on a vocal minority protesting the film over his casting of a black man as Johnny Storm. The uproar became loud enough that Jordan penned an essay on Entertainment Weekly begging people to hear Stan Lee, who endorsed the casting, and move on. “I was getting threats on IMDb message boards saying they were going to shoot me,” Trank said. To find some level of ease, the director kept a loaded .38 Special on his nightstand.
>“I was so fucking paranoid during that shoot,” said Trank. “If someone came into my house, I would have ended their fucking life. When you’re in a head space where people want to get you, you think, ‘I’m going to defend myself.’” Trank returned the gun after wrapping production.
This was supposed to be the big reboot that would've really revived the Fantastic Four as a film franchise and instead Fox seemingly gave complete control to a guy who openly despised literally everything about the source material. It'd be like putting a Zig Forumslack in charge of an MLK film.
Robert Jackson
>basically be the filmic version of how I saw myself all the time: the metaphor of these characters crawling out of hell." what a child
Camden Ross
SPBP
Juan Evans
It is interesting history
Austin Hall
>The first cut of FANTASTIC FOUR caught studio executives off-guard, Trank said. They told the director the movie wasn’t the marketable romp anyone hoped for. It “wasn’t for fans.” The morose tone would make people uncomfortable. It made them uncomfortable. “That was the goal,” he told me. At least for him.
>Reshoots and pickups are standard for modern blockbusters, but for FANTASTIC FOUR, they were urgent: The movie didn’t have an ending. Trank claimed that before production took place, Fox slashed the budget by nearly $30 million, and cut a majority of the spectacle-filled finale, with the idea that one could be filmed in the second round of shooting. But changes to the movie would become more drastic, and a difficult scheduling process that involved bringing in actors on weekends (and outfitting them with notable wigs) made cobbling together a third-act setpiece all the more difficult. According to Slater, most of the finished film turned out to be an expanded version of his initial 40 pages, minus all of the superheroics.
>Much of the scramble to “save” FANTASTIC FOUR remains shrouded by NDAs and Trank’s own lack of participation. Fox hired other writers to generate script pages to be shot during reshoots, though Trank never met them. He wrote pages himself in hopes of putting his voice back in the film, and the pages were dutifully ignored. The director eventually confronted producers over Director’s Guild union rights that “were not being recognized,” and the studio complied. Trank said he negotiated a new deal in which he would re-edit the movie while Fox worked on its own cut, and both versions would screen for test audiences.
>Hates the source material >Doesn't listen to his friend/writer's advice or encouragement and disagrees so much with him that he lets him get replaced with studio writers >His only big 'win' was casting a black actor in a white role >Can't handle actors and blames the studio for being totally in over his head >Is so afraid of people hating on his casting choice that he buys a revolver and admits he would've killed someone who came to his door >After everything, blames it on the stuido.
What a shithead.
Dominic Hughes
>that was the goal brah you were making fantastic 4
Henry Davis
>The studio hired editor Stephen Rivkin, whose credited work includes AVATAR and the first three PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movies, to prepare FANTASTIC FOUR for the runoff. Rivkin ultimately chose different takes for every single scene in the movie, and became “the de facto director,” Trank said. And in the director’s mind, Rivkin chose the bad takes. “There are some editors, from my point of view, who prefer using takes for pacing over performance. So they’ll say, ‘He moved out of that quicker,’ or, ‘He did this quicker.’ It’s about a certain kind of a rhythm that they are looking for.” There are moments in the finished film that Trank appreciates — Doctor Doom blowing up security guard heads as he strolls down a hallway, the scene in which Tim Blake Nelson’s head explodes, the shriek-filled introduction of mutated Reed Richards’ elastic body (in which no heads explode) — but the director found Rivkin’s ultimate decisions to be cheesy. “I maybe saw a couple of shots that really resonated.”
>Unfortunately for Trank, the two versions of FANTASTIC FOUR were never in a faceoff. In January 2015, he realized that “there was no path out of hell,” and that the studio had already spent three months, plus millions of dollars, for planned rewrites and reshoots that would fit Rivkin’s cut. A teaser trailer that month supposedly inspired new directions for the film, which by then was out of Trank’s hands. “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.’” Trank edited his version anyway, hoping Fox would pluck select scenes and drop them into Rivkin’s cut. Maybe critics would see those moments and give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe.
He's an alcoholic cokehead who managed to get into some kind of altercation with all of his main cast in some way or another.
>fell out with Michael B Jordan, who was his best friend before filming began >got into a drunken fist fight with Miles Teller in the Fox parking lot >bullied Kate Mara routinely on set (all stemming from Fox veto'ing Margot Robbie as Sue, who Trank was pushing for, in favour of Mara who was hot property at the time thanks to House of Cards) to the point where she broke down in tears at point, which led to her boyfriend Jamie Bell scruffing Trank by the collar against a wall and threatening to kill him if he kept harassing her
Josiah Edwards
I think the role of Sue may be cursed.
Mason Edwards
Seriously
Christian Ramirez
kate mara is a nobody tho
James Young
>no proof sure, user, sure
Elijah Sullivan
What a lying piece of shit. He was a drunken drug addict who was given too much too soon in his career, and thought he was a big shot before his film was even done. This is the same asshole who yelled in Kate Mara's face making her cry, and shouted at actors telling them when to blink on camera. Oh, and he basically pissed away the budget, trashed hotel rooms, and by the time FOX stepped in he was late AND didn't even have a proper ending. And if that weren't bad enough, the faggot shoots himself in the foot the night before release on twitter throwing the film under the bus, thus ending his career.
>A sense of loss sank in during reshoots. The contention left Trank defeated, and his new goal — to appease the producers, who might incorporate as many chunks of his personal cut into the finished product as possible — went against his artistic tenets. “It was like being castrated,” he said of being on the set, which was overseen by Kinberg and producer Hutch Parker. “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 only yes or no.”
>Whispers of the turmoil reached Disney and Kathleen Kennedy at Lucasfilm, where Trank had set up his next project, a standalone movie about Boba Fett. No one had seen the cut of FANTASTIC FOUR that would arrive in theaters (including Trank), but the he-said-she-said dispute was enough to shake her confidence. Trank said he and Kennedy agreed that the director should sit out his scheduled appearance at the 2015 Star Wars Celebration in April, but even then, he couldn’t pick the conversation back up. FANTASTIC FOUR, the STAR WARS spinoff that wasn’t, all the other development deals — they were the end of something. Shortly after bowing out of the convention over a case of the “worst flu of my life,” as he tweeted, Trank told his managers he wouldn’t do Star Wars and wouldn’t look for more blockbuster work. Days later, the trades announced that the director was “fired” off his Star Wars movie. “I quit because I knew I was going to be fired if I didn’t quit.”
What a prick. He's trying to paint himself as some robbed artist when the reality is that FOX had to step in to clean his mess because they were over-budget, delayed twice, and the film wasn't even done
Josiah Thomas
>which led to her boyfriend Jamie Bell scruffing Trank by the collar against a wall and threatening to kill him if he kept harassing her
Unironically based af
Parker Kelly
its clobberin time
Benjamin Morales
>Trank tried to keep a straight face through the summer of 2015. He promoted the marketing of his ill-fated blockbuster on Facebook and Twitter. He played hype man on the Jumbotron of San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H. In interviews, he defended against the finger-pointing with level-headed messaging. “It’s been a challenging movie — for all of the right reasons,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
>Trank's frustrations kept building, and finally came to the surface - at the worst possible time. On August 7, 2015, hours before his $150 million comic book reboot opened on 3,995 North American screens, Trank smashed the self-destruct button. “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this,” he tweeted in blind rage. “And it would’ve recieved [sic] great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”
>Provoked by a review suggesting that Fantastic Four be “studied in film schools as an example of what not to do,” the writer-director fired off 138 vicious characters without so much as a reread to catch his typo. The responses were immediate. He had champions who praised the gall it took to slap back against The Man, and detractors who thought the whole episode was maybe a little gauche. Drowning in a sea of notifications, Trank finally picked up the phone when his manager called.
>“He was afraid of what was gonna happen to me,” Trank told me of the dizzying moment. “I was messing with one of the most powerful corporations in the world.”
>The tweet, as he sized up in retrospect, was spitting in the face of every person who attempted to make his version of FANTASTIC FOUR work. It offended his collaborators and silenced the friends he had in the industry. He went out swinging to defend a “fantastic version of FANTASTIC FOUR” — a version of the movie that no one, including Trank, can really say existed.
>Josh Trank was the obvious candidate to reinvigorate the Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox >Trank was the opposite, having only seen a few episodes of the cartoon from the mid-90's and having a general distaste for comic book movies Subverted!
Elijah Young
what really happened is a young man being told by everyone in hollywood that his shit didn't stink, and his believing it. success too early goes right to the head and he self-destructed.
Jaxon Powell
I actually remember this now. There was proof as the other reply said from his twitter.,
Gavin Ramirez
>On February 27, 2016, FANTASTIC FOUR won the Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Remake of the year. It wouldn’t have hurt as much if a production assistant hadn’t accepted the award on no one’s behalf. (“The dude saw me chain-smoking, and probably heard me crying a few times. That’s petty.”) That June, The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters, who originally reported on FANTASTIC FOUR the year prior, took the opportunity to ask Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg about the director. “So when you look at young directors, how do you know you’re not hiring another Josh Trank?” she asked. “Who is that?” Spielberg wondered. In a text at the time, Trank shrugged off the viral shade. “At least I know he watched CHRONICLE,” he wrote.
>No matter how many times Trank quit then logged back on to Instagram, or deactivated then reactivated Twitter, he couldn’t cold-turkey quit the internet and really move on. Last November, the filmmaker created an account on Letterboxd, a moviegoers haven in which users track their viewing habits with informal reviews. Now he was back online, reviewing FANTASTIC FOUR, saying he “expected it to be much worse than it was.” In just a handful of words, the director praised the actors and curtailed any talk of #ReleaseTheTrankCut. At the end, he wrote out the mantra he’s been telling himself for four years: “I don’t regret any of it.”
That's pretty much it, the rest is about his Al Capone movie with Tom Hardy.
>After five months of sleeping on blow-up mattresses and playing Ghost Recon with Hardy is hardy ourguy?
Alexander Diaz
Because this was after Marvel slam-dunked the revival of the superhero movie after 10+ years of it languishing in obscurity and delivering almost everything nerds and the common audience wanted. I mean, every single quote of his - from his perspective of every confrontation - clearly portrays him as the asshole who's in the wrong. How could anyone like that possibly produce a cohesive creative work that requires coordinating as many people as a movie does?
Sebastian Cruz
>It wouldn’t have hurt as much if a production assistant hadn’t accepted the award on no one’s behalf. (“The dude saw me chain-smoking, and probably heard me crying a few times. That’s petty.”)
Based. Trank probably treated that person like shit.
This thread was also the first time anyone ever hinted that the Kang rights were at Fox, and not Marvel Studios. James Gunn would eventually actually confirm this a few days later.
