It'd be difficult to find anyone who would champion Josh Trank's Fantastic Four as a good movie, but the director has always maintained that if he had been able to make the film he wanted to without studio interference, the finished product would have been a lot better than the clusterf*ck that was released into theaters in 2015.
We've had to take Trank's word on that, of course, but it definitely sounds like 20th Century Fox did insist on some pretty major last-minute changes which completely altered the overall tone.
While speaking to Polygon, Trank revealed that the studio actually panicked when they saw how fans were reacting to the darker, more somber tone of the trailers online, and were determined to lighten things up.
“They really do pay attention to what people are saying on Twitter," said Trank. "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.’”
Reshoots were ordered, and while Trank was present on set, it sounds like he had very little input into what was being filmed and re-edited (Stephen Rivkin was hired to work on a new cut), and pretty much checked out.
“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.”
We'll never know how Fant4stic would have turned out if Trank had been able to realize his original vision, but the filmmaker did reveal how his take on the story would have paved the way for a sequel.
“The end of the Fantastic Four was going to very organically set up the adventure and the weirdness and the fun,” he explained. “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.”
Okay then. What do you make of Trank's comments? Do you think Fantastic Four could have been salvaged? Let us know in the usual place.