Fantastic Four was dull. No doubt about that. But you know what’s not dull? All of the scandalous details about the film’s troubled production. The Hollywood Reporter reached out to their sources and have dug up even more dirt on director Josh Trank (Chronicle) and the way 20th Century Fox handled the behind-the-scenes mess.
Let’s begin with Trank’s infamous tweet. A day before the film was to open nationwide, Trank tried to distance himself from the reboot, which was by then getting hammered by critics. He expressed his unhappiness with the film’s final cut and insisted at one time he had made a “fantastic version.” Box office analysts believe that tweet cost the film as much as $10M in its debut weekend. You would assume based on Trank’s tweet that he was unhappy for quite some time, but that’s reportedly not the case. A source for The Hollywood Reporter has informed them that Trank was extremely positive about Fantastic Four days before the film was to be released, issuing an email to select cast and crew members proclaiming it was “better than 99 percent of the comic-book movies ever made.” One candid cast member responded, “I don’t think so.” Burn!!!
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THR’s sources witnessed Trank on set, describing his behavior as “extremely withdrawn.” He avoided interacting with people by hiding away in his tent and trailer for much of the time. When he had to converse with his cast he apparently gave them some unusual directions. “During takes, he would be telling [castmembers] when to blink and when to breathe,” a source told THR. “He kept pushing them to make the performance as flat as possible.”
Then there is the Baton Rouge home that Fox rented for Trank during filming. It reportedly incurred $100K worth of damage. Trank would later downplay the damage and placed much of the blame upon his two dogs. THR reports: “Sources say now that after landlord Martin Padial moved to evict Trank, photographs of the landlord’s family that were in the house were defaced.”
A Fantastic Four crew member thinks Fox is as much to blame in the film’s failure. He believes the film was “ill-conceived, made for the wrong reasons and there was no vision behind the property.” Adding that Fox only gave it the green light because they were “afraid of losing the rights” to Marvel Studios.
Another THR source told them that with half of the film in the can, Fox realized Trank wasn’t working out and strongly considered removing him. By then it was too late. The only directors that would take on a half-completed film would have to be desperate for work.
As filming wound toward an unhappy close, the studio and producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker engaged in a last-minute scramble to come up with an ending. With some of the cast not fully available at that point and Kinberg juggling X-Men: Apocalypse and Star Wars, a lot of material was shot with doubles and the production moved to Los Angeles to film scenes with Teller against a green screen. “It was chaos,” says a crewmember, adding that Trank was still in attendance “but was neutralized by a committee.” Another source says the studio pulled together “a dream team,” including writer and World War Z veteran Drew Goddard, to rescue the movie. Whether the final version of the film is better or worse than what Trank put together is a matter of opinion, of course, but the consensus, clearly, is that neither was good. – The Hollywood Reporter
A contemporary re-imagining of Marvel’s original and longest-running superhero team, centers on four young outsiders who teleport to an alternate and dangerous universe, which alters their physical form in shocking ways. Their lives irrevocably upended, the team must learn to harness their daunting new abilities and work together to save Earth from a former friend turned enemy.
