Josh Trank Watched a Few FANTASTIC FOUR Cartoons Before Directing The Film and Writer Jeremy Slater Was Not a Fan of Him

After Josh Trank was hired to direct Fantastic Four for Fox, he brought on Jeremy Slater to help him write the script for the movie. Slater is a big comic book fan who could have brought a lot of cool stuff to the film, but the two ended up having very different visions of what the movie should be. As you might imagine, this caused some problems.

In a recent profile of Trank at Polygon, they explained that Trank had only watched a few episodes of the Fantastic Four cartoon before working on the movie and, he wasn’t a fan of comic book movies. Slater said:

 "The first Avengers movie had recently come out, and I kept saying, ‘That should be our template, that’s what audiences want to see!’ And Josh just fucking hated every second of it."

For a guy that wasn’t familiar with Fantastic Four and had only watched a few episodes of a cartoon before working on the film, the movie was doomed from the beginning to be bad! However, Trank counters that point, saying: 

"The trials of developing Fantastic Four had everything to do with tone. You could take the most ‘comic booky’ things, as far as just names and faces and identities and backstories, and synthesize it into a tone. And the tone that [Slater] was interested in was not a tone that I felt I had anything in common with."

Slater tried to convince Trank that his way was the right way by giving him comic books from his own collection to read through, but Trank didn’t care and just wanted to explore his own take on the property, which he obviously didn’t know anything about. Slater said:

"It didn’t matter if they were fighting robots in Latveria or aliens in the Negative Zone or Mole Monsters in downtown Manhattan; Josh just did not give a shit.”

Trank responded to that with:

"I feel like I get Mole Man. He’s angry and undermined by the system."

Slater says that he wrote nearly 18 drafts of the script and 2000 pages while working on the film, but only two of those scripts made it to Fox. It’s explained that Trank insisted on acting as a messenger between his writer and the studio, and would only give him certain notes. Slater continued:

"Right from the start of the process, Josh told me I wasn’t allowed to speak with Fox without him present. I never saw 95% of those notes."

Wow! That’s just insane to me! What a nightmare of a project this must have been to be a part of! It got so out of hand and frustrating that Slater ended up walking away from Fantastic Four after six months of working on it. The movie went on and started shooting without a complete script, they didn’t even have a third act and well, we all know how that turned out.

Damn, Trank won’t take any responsibly for anything that went wrong with this film! This is crazy!