Director Josh Trank Says Doing The FANTASTIC FOUR Reshoots "Was Like Being Castrated"

Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four movie was not met with the kind of praise that the filmmaker and the studio were hoping for. In fact, it killed the franchise and fans believed that the only studio that could save it was Marvel Studios, and now that it’s in their hands, we’re excitedly waiting to see what they do with these characters.

From everything we’ve heard about Trank’s Fantastic Four movie, the whole production was a clusterfuck where the director was a huge problem and the studio was trying to fix what he had done. You can read some of the claims made against him here.

During an interview with Polygon, Trank claimed that the studio actually panicked when they saw how fans were reacting to the darker, more somber tone of the trailers online, and the studio was determined to lighten things up.

“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.’”

So, the studio ordered reshoots, and while Trank was on the set of the film during these reshoots, 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 Trank basically checked out.

“It was like being castrated. 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.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t recall there being any humor in Fantastic Four. I just remember a terrible story with an awful script. Regardless, having a movie taken away from you can never be fun for any director, and I imagine this was hard on Trank.

Obviously the visions of the studio and Trank did not align and when that happens, shitty films are born. I’d be curious to know what Trank’s version of the movie would have been like. The director did reveal how his take on the story would have paved the way for a sequel, though:

“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.”

I don’t know, I’m not sure if Trank’s version would have been any better than what we got because the bones of the film were brittle to begin with.