If it’s one thing Hollywood loves, its squeezing everything they can out of fresh new faces. Just think about at all the once-promising young actors and starlets or once hot directors that now couldn’t land a Lifetime movie. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood now has its eyes set on young directing sensation,
Josh Trank. After releasing his hit sci-fi flick
Chronicle to the tune of $123M at the box-office on a budget of a mere $15M, studios are literally falling over themselves to offer Trank all the comic book projects he can handle. In a span of of roughly 5 months after the February 3rd release date of
Chronicle, Trank saw his name attached to the following projects:
- Venom (first reported March 6th) Sony -rumored
- The Red Star (confirmed March 20th) Warner Bros.
- Chronicle Sequel (first reported March 23) 20th Century Fox -rumored
- Shadow of the Colossus (confirmed May 23) Sony
- Fantastic Four (confirmed July 11) 20th Century Fox
It should be noted that script writer
Max Landis has been frank in his assessment of Trank’s sudden popularity and concedes that Trank may not return to helm a Chronicle sequel but nothing's confirmed yet. One of the more concrete projects on that list is
The Red Star which already has a tentative release date set for 2014. When Deadline announced that Trank had finally accepted directing duties on
Fantastic Four, the thing that caught my eye was the statement that the Fantastic Four reboot was going to be fast tracked for production right after
X-Men:First Class giving the film a production start date of approximately mid-late 2013. Perhaps this is a sign of some anxiety on Fox’s part. The property might be close, relatively speaking, to reverting back to Marvel Studios like Fox’s other Marvel property, Daredevil. The
last Fantastic Four film came in 2007 and the last ‘Daredevil-esque’ film,
Elektra, was released in 2005.
If Daredevil doesn’t enter production by this Fall, film rights revert back to Marvel. A reasonable assumption would be that Fox brokered a similar deal for Fantastic Four, creating a similar 7-yr allowance between films and giving Fox until 2014 to get a Fantastic Four film into production. Hence, the sudden surge in Fantastic Four news.
An interesting thought to be sure but what I think is worth noting here is that Trank signed on to helm The Red Star for Warner Brothers first and that’s a project which already had someone working on the script. Originally, this was to be Trank’s next project before the Deadline report noted that Fox “expects Fantastic Four to be the next film Trank directs.” Why exactly they expect that was never made clear and while I’m not privy to what’s in Trank’s deal with Warner Bros., I would think a premiere studio like Warner would have enclosures that ensure that Trank adheres to a specific timeline for film production,and with a tentative release date set for 2014, that timeline would make it very hard to shoot a Fantastic Four film for a rival studio. The Red Star would need to have virtually a perfect production, no reshoots, no lengthy casting searches, or any of the other typical delays that normally occur in film production. To date, I’ve seen no reports that say that Red Star has been pushed or scrapped so things simply just don’t add up here.
And let’s not forget that two years ago, Fantastic Four was supposedly ramping up production with active negotiations taking place between several actors and directors. Its still very possible that Trank could direct but until there’s more solid news on this project, I for one, remain skeptical.
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Josh Trank To Direct SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS; Still Attached To FANTASTIC FOUR/VENOM
FANTASTIC FOUR Reboot To Be Developed By Josh Trank Who May Or May Not Direct
Writer Max Landis Teases New CHRONICLE 2 Details; Says Josh Trank Unlikely To Direct