Chronicle director Josh Trank’s 2015 feature Fantastic Four is unanimously considered a bad and terribly dull film. Even Trank himself has spoken out against the theatrical cut that utterly bombed at the domestic and global box office, claiming that studio interference is what led to that particular version’s release. Of course, now that Disney owns all things 20th Century Fox, including the latter’s Marvel licenses, this means Marvel Studios can — and probably will — return to the franchise sometime in the near future. Until then, Trank just can’t stop hating on his own movie.
https://twitter.com/joshuatrank/status/1198055599222726657
On Friday, the Fonzo director tweeted out a link to his own Fantastic Four review on the social media platform Letterboxd. Needless to say, nearly five years after the fact, the filmmaker is nowhere near as harsh as he once was about the experience, though that doesn’t mean he likes the film now. On the contrary, Trank still dislikes Fantastic Four, which he considers “alright”:
Great cast.
Everyone in the film is a great actor, and overall there is a movie in there, somewhere. And that cast deserves to be in THAT movie. Everyone who worked on Fant4stic clearly wanted to be making THAT movie. But…. ultimately… It wasn’t.
Did I make that movie they deserved to be in?
To be honest?
I can’t tell.
“What I can tell is there are TWO different movies in one movie competing to be that movie,” he continues, adding he “was 29 years old, making my 2nd film, in a situation more complicated than anything a 2nd time filmmaker should’ve walked into.” Despite his comments on Letterboxd, and everything else he’s said about the making of Fantastic Four, however, Trank insists he “[doesn’t] regret any of it.”
He also presumably references an old Collider interview with Ant-Man and the Wasp director Peyton Reed, in which comedy filmmaker discussed an early Fantastic Four pitch of his to Marvel. Reed’s take on the iconic Marvel Comics characters was set during the 1960s and influenced by the music and celebrity of the Beatles. Reed is reportedly hard at work on Ant-Man 3, but while Marvel Studios does have the ability to redo Fantastic Four for the MCU, it has no confirmed plans to do so at this time.
