WHAT WENT WRONG - Fantastic Four (2015)

Episode Date: June 16, 2020

There are only two good reasons to make a movie - one, the script is great; two, if you don’t, Marvel gets their characters back. This week, Chris & Lizzie fire up Fox’s 2015 misfire reboot of Fantastic Four, from director Josh Trank’s schadenfraude-laden fall from grace to comic book culture’s weird obsession with race.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Follow Us on Instagram! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast about what went wrong on some of Hollywood's biggest hits and biggest flops. This week, we watched the 2015 superhero film Fantastic Four. Lizzie, what were your initial thoughts? Okay, my general reaction was, why are the wigs so bad? Okay. I'm so glad that everyone who starred in this has continued to have a career. I would say biggest critique is that nothing happens and also the wigs are bad. Fair enough.

And we'll get into why both of those problems exist in this movie because there are very clear reasons through our research. Fantastic Four was released in 2015. It was a reboot of the 2005-2007 Fantastic. 4 series that starred a young Chris Evans, Jessica Alba and Jan Gruffled. No, come on. It's Yohan Griffith. Horatio Hornblower. There it is. Yon Griffith. A Welsh actor who was in Titanic as well. My mom loves him.

Okay, fair enough. Those fantastic movies were a critical disappointment, although they did do well at the box office. And so on August 7th, 2015, Fantastic Four was set to date. debut across all of America, 4,000 screens. And in the wee hours of that day, the director, Josh Trank, this was his second film, read a review that suggested that Fantastic Four should be, quote, studied in film schools as an example of what not to do. He picked up his phone, typed out a tweet, and fired it off into the ether. It was pretty obviously directed at 20th Century Fox and the tweet read, a year ago, I had a fantastic version of this and it would have

received great reviews. You'll probably never see it. That's reality, though. It opened to dismal reviews, a I believe unfairly harsh 9% on Rotten Tomatoes and an anemic box office run. It lost the studio upwards of $100 million and Josh Trank disappeared until this year, which we'll get into. Fox canceled a planned sequel and life went on. The actors went on to do other things, but the question remains, what went wrong? So to answer this question, we need to go back to why this project was being rebooted in the first place. So in August of 2009, 20th Century Fox announces that they're going to reboot Fantastic Four. As I mentioned, they'd release two Fantastic Four films to date. The Chris Evans ones is the Human Torch. They'd both

been poorly received critically. Did you see either of them, Lizzie? Wait, I'm sorry, there were two of the Chris Evans and was Michael Chickles the rock thing in that? He was. He was the thing. Yep. And so there was the Fantastic Four in 2005, which actually received some criticism because they took Hispanic actress Jessica Alba and they made her a blonde and blue-eyed

woman in that. And then they had the 2007 one Rise of the Silver Surfer that did more poorly than the first one and not very many people saw it. So they canned that franchise. Chris Evans actually almost didn't take the Captain America role because he was tired of superhero things. Yep. So the question

remains why make another one? So we have this great clip from a very strange Atlanta DJ Southside Steve. My question would be after watching, you know, I've seen the first two, you know, the only two that I've ever seen Jessica and everything. Why redo, why do another one? I mean, is it just a reboot? This is what Hollywood is into just redoing it again? Was that not the right Fantastic Four? Does this one follow more of a comic book lines and the other one did? So that was on the press tour of this Fantastic Four reboot of radio personality asking Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, and Jamie Bell, why did you do this? Why did you make another one? And this is before anybody's seen the movie. But this was at the time when like Spider-Man's

getting rebooted multiple times, Batman's been rebooted multiple times. So Lizzie, do you have any idea why they would redo this movie again? I don't know why they rebooted this. As far as I can tell, It's like off-brand. It's like the Kirkland brand versions of all of the regular superheroes. And it doesn't seem like a particularly appealing story. And honestly, as I was watching it, particularly watching this one, it feels almost exactly like X-Men First Class. For good reason. We'll get into that.

So I kind of had the same thoughts. I think the assumption amongst the public is that you reboot superhero movies just to keep making, like, print more money off of them. But there's actually a more logistical reason why they have to. to keep rebooting these projects, specifically Spider-Man at Sony. Oh, it's because of the rights on the characters. Exactly. So Marvel Studios gave up the rights to Fantastic Four in a really weird way in the mid-90s that we won't get into.

But basically, Fox has to release a new one every seven years, or at least go into production on it, or the rights relapse to Marvel Studios. And so they decide, we need to reboot this project because we're not going to do another sequel to it. To be clear, Marvel is not happy with the idea of, this reboot. In fact, if you look it up, in late 2014, Marvel published an issue of Punisher, in which three actors who look just like Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, and Kate Mara, are talking about a new movie they're starring in directed by someone named Trang, and our director is Trank on this one,

and moments later, the building they're in explodes, killing them instantly. So Marvel was not thrilled that this movie was getting made. They didn't support it. They weren't excited by it, because they're doing the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and they want the Fantastic Four to come back to them so they can be part of the Avengers. But Fox... Oh, leave them out. But Fox decides they're going to make this movie.

So they bring on Akiva Goldsman, who's mostly a writer and a producer. He did, like, The Client, Batman Forever, Cinderella Man, the Dark Tower. He's going to produce, and they bring in Michael Green to write. And he wrote on Smallville, Heroes, American Gods. So these are both guys with, like, big budget, superhero credentials, but they need a director. And so, meanwhile, it's the Super Bowl weekend of 2012 and 20th Century Fox is attempting to downplay the box office expectations of a little $12 million sci-fi movie they're releasing called Chronicle. It takes place in Seattle. It's about three boys who get superpowers effectively when they're in high school.

Just clarify for me for a second, so I make sure I'm thinking of the right thing. Is this the one that Max Landis is responsible for? Correct. Yeah. It's a found footage kind of anti-superhero film. It's about three high school boys. They acquire telekinesis from a weird crystal underground. And it becomes a story about the morality of having power. Dane Dahan gets corrupted by the power. And then Michael B. Jordan and the other lead actor have to stop him as he starts wreaking havoc on the humans below.

Josh Trank is a first-time director. The studio's happy with the movie, but they have no idea what to expect. They're releasing it on the Super Bowl. Box office watchers are expecting $15 million opening. And it finishes the weekend. at $22 million. It's number one on the box office that weekend. It goes on to make $120 million globally,

which is 10 times its budget of $12 million. And that weekend, overnight, all the sudden, Josh Trank, who's a 27-year-old Wonder Kid, who's the director of it. It's his first movie, and he just edged out James Cameron and Steven Spielberg as the youngest director to open a film number one at the box office

in cinema history. Josh Trank's from L.A., he grew up wanting to be a director. he gave himself until 27 to make his first movie. And at 27, he releases his first movie. And he is literally being called the next James Cameron and the next Steven Spielberg. Oh, buddy. All of a sudden, he is the hottest guy in Hollywood.

You haven't seen Chronicle. Go watch it. It's really good. And if you've seen it, you can see why he's exciting. Because he made a superhero movie that's edgy and youthful and gritty and different. And this is right when Chris Nolan is launching the Batman Begins Dark Night trilogy. And Hollywood wants to do these dark. or edgier types of superhero stories.

So all of a sudden, he's blowing up in Hollywood. He's getting offers to do Venom, the Spider-Man spinoff. These are huge properties. He's only made one movie, and he is getting offered everything. And it's not that he doesn't deserve it. Chronicle's great. But as we've talked about in some of these other episodes, it's a really, really, really tricky thing, I think, for a director to jump from a small movie to a giant tent pole studio movie.

Yeah, I don't totally understand the logic of like, and that seems to have been a very much a trend in recent years. We saw it to a certain extent with, wasn't that Colin Trevereaux taking over, do you take over Jurassic? Yeah, Colin Trevor went from safety not guaranteed to Jurassic World. And then Gareth Edwards went from monsters to Godzilla. Right. And then Josh Trank did Chronicle to Fantastic Four. Those are kind of the three. Yeah, I just, I find it interesting that the assumption is that because,

you've made this independent, very low budget film where you are, you have essentially more autonomy than you will ever have on any other project that you can then head into something that is, I would assume, just like 100% bureaucracy. Like every decision has to be run off the flagpole. And I also just want to say, I think it's interesting that they, they don't seem to be giving a lot of young female directors who have won successful independent film under their belts, superhero movies. It would be nice if they did. more of that. No, they are certainly focused on

especially young white men, with the exception of Ryan Coogler, who did more of an incremental stabbing stone to his Black Panther project. So Josh Trank, he needs his next movie, and 20th Century Fox

needs their next superhero director, and they just worked together on Chronicle, so this feels like a match made in heaven. The prior to Fantastic Four movies were hokey and cartoonish. The industry is looking for something like Batman Begins or The Dark Night. And Trank comes in and he's like, we need to make this edgy, gritty. If anyone can turn this tale of four scientists stumbling onto superhuman powers into something

raw and real, it's going to be him. In July of 2012, Trank's made his decision and Deadline Hollywood announces his next film is going to be a fantastic for her with 20th Century Fox. They found lightning in a bottle once and they're going to go for it again. So at this point, Akiva Goldsman has been off the project for a little bit. They didn't love his take, as my understanding. And they brought on screenwriters, Zach Stents, and Ashley Edward Miller, who wrote X-Men First Class. Oh.

And his X-Men First Class predates this, right? Just barely. Just barely predates it. It's almost concurrent to it. So it seems like the first problem that we can flag that they're running into is that there's instantly a time constraint that Fox is dealing with. So their last one came out in 2007. They really need to get into production by 2014 if the rights aren't going to revert to Marvel Studios. Trank's brought in in 2012.

So they have this limited window to come up with a version that Josh Trank can direct and they can get into production on. And the problem is it really feels like the direction that they were going in with Stents and Miller is not the direction that Trank wanted to take the movie on. So Trank comes on. He tells Fox that he wants Jeremy Slater, his screenwriting, friend to be scripting the movie. So Fox says fine and they fire Stenson Miller. And I found this fun clip with Zach Stence talking about this project with Kevin Smith. And so here's Zach Stence, who seems like a really nice guy, talking about the Fantastic Four script that he wrote that would never be made. And the other thing that's never going to happen is the version that Ash and I did of

the Fantastic Four, which was the, which it's funny. Josh Trank, who, ended up doing the Fantastic Four that we saw in the theaters, we were supposed to be writing the script for him, but no one told him that we were doing it. And so when he officially signed on, he was like, why are you imposing these other writers on me? I want to use my own writer, I want to do my own script, and he did his version instead. And it was one of the things, it was one of those hammer blows to our career at the time, even though we had gotten paid, because I was so freaking proud of that script.

It was like how they were young, and it was how the Fantastic Four were almost the Fantastic Five, except for someone, a young man named Victor von Doom, who was just too damaged and fucked up to be part of them. And it was, again, script I was very proud of. Josh Trank didn't want to do it. I, in one of the moments that I regret most in my career, I expressed a little bit of Schadenfreude at how that version of the Fantastic Four ended up crashing and burning.

And you know what? I don't feel good about that. You shouldn't, even though it freaking hurt like a motherfucker that he didn't use our script, I don't blame him. Like, if you were a director and someone said, like, use a script, like wouldn't you like automatically like like kind of put your hackles?

I wish that somebody had said on yoga hosers here use this script. So I love Kevin Smith's reaction to that story. And Stent sounds like a genuinely nice guy and apparently he reached out to Trank in later years and they made up. But Trank brings in Jeremy Slater and to be clear, Jeremy Slater is the writer that helped him come up with Chronicle. and then Max Landis ended up writing it. So they have this limited window to deliver a script, and they're starting from scratch. They've dumped Stenson Miller's original idea of, you know, why wasn't it the Fantastic Five, and it's now the Fantastic Four. Oh, man, that's such a better idea.

It sounds really fun. But the problem was that Trank hated superhero movies, and that's why it's a really, it's really weird that he decided to direct this, because apparently Slater's a huge nerd, and he's obsessed with the Fantastic Four, and he comes in and he's pitching every possible movie. version of the movie he can think of and every time he gets to the point in the story where they get their superpowers, Josh Trank loses interest in the story. And so he can't find an angle. Slater says he wants it to be like the Avengers because audience is like that and Trank hates the Avengers. Trank does connect with the story as this like form of body horror. And there's a quote from him at the time saying, how terrifying would it be to have your arms suddenly turned into rubber or your skin burst into flame?

Chronicles about the evolution and strengthening of unique powers, this movie is really viewing them as a curse. And so I think some of that shows up in the final film, but that's what interested Trank in the project. And the problem was like Slater couldn't really deliver that. And then on top of that, Trank was already struggling to maintain control over the project. During the six months he was on the project, Slater estimates that he wrote 18 drafts and over 2,000 pages of material in six months. the problem is the studio only saw two of those drafts. So Josh Trank acted as the go between, between Slater and the studio, and he forbade them from speaking to one another. So Slater estimates that he only saw 5% of the notes that Fox was sending because Trank was intercepting and trying to modulate between the two.

And apparently, six months in, Slater leaves the project in Fox. I can only imagine that they're just thinking, this isn't working. We have to find a more experienced writer. And maybe that's Slater's fault. Maybe that's Josh Trank's fault. To be honest, this is like one of the most frustrating. Yeah, I mean, the fact that you can frequently wind up with kind of sort of like a gatekeeper of information in my experience and I obviously have never written a movie. I never directed a movie.

I do work in a creative position. But that is almost always detrimental to the end result to not just let people talk to each other. And I think Trank by his own admission, and we'll get to his perspective on this later, he was so freaked out and distraught. trusting of everybody around him that he felt the need to control, like, as many aspects of the process as he could. Which I understand. Yeah, absolutely. I would be terrified.

So they bring in a few new writers, and specifically they bring in this writer-producer, Simon Kinberg. And Simon Kinberg most recently directed Dark Phoenix. He was the kind of guiding force behind Brian Singer's reboot of the X-Men series of the 2000s. So Fox sees Kinberg as a steady hand. Brian Singer is like a notoriously difficult director to work with and problematic. Also just a human walking nightmare. I think we can safely say that.

Yeah. And Kinberg had successfully helped him bring his movies, you know, to the screen. And so they're like Josh Trank, you know, Kinberg can handle him. And it seems like Kinberg and Trank got along really well. And so Trank told Kenberg he had two ambitions with the project. He wanted the movie to feel scary and feel real, more like. a horror movie than a superhero flick. And secondly, it had to be a coming of age story.

And Kinberg kind of explains, like, it's, you know, part of defining yourself is the moment when you go from being dependent to being in control of your destiny. And what I want to reinforce here is that, like, what I'm describing this movie as body horror, as horror, as real, this is coming from Simon Kinberg, who is like a Fox institution. So this means the studio was buying off on this version of the movie from Josh Trank up until this point. He's an interesting guy and he is super smart.

And I, like, from what I've seen and heard of him in interviews, like, I do think his creative instincts are pretty good. So in January of 2014, variety reports that Kinberg's finished rewriting the script. But according to interviews I read with Josh Trank, they had entered production without a third act. Now, this is, this actually, though, I do want to note, this isn't unusual. So a lot of, there will be a lot of reporting that, like, they went into production and the script wasn't finished on superhero movies and a lot of big buzzer.

movies, the movie's not done, it's not, they have not finished writing it when they're shooting it. And that's partially by design. So like, Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise movie, they hadn't finished the ending. Part of what they want to do is they want to find the tone and the pacing of the film and then design the third act set piece to pay off like what they've already written and filmed with the stories. Oh my God. I would be having 85 panic attacks a day if I didn't know how it was going to end. Yeah. And usually I think they want some idea. And this might have been more informed than usual. But this is by design. They go in planning for reshoots in advance of production, knowing that they're going to be parts of the story that need to change. And it allows them to adapt and

shift things as they go. I think, though, that there's actually a really bright point in the process that we're going to come across right now. And Lizzie mentioned earlier, the cast is great in this movie. It is. It's an exceptional cast. It's an exceptional young cast. It's also a really great cast for another interesting reason, which is the casting of Michael B. Jordan as the character Johnny Storm. So traditionally, Johnny Storm is a white character in the Marvel comic series, Fantastic Four. And Trank, having worked with Michael B. Jordan on Chronicle and just Trank being, I think, smart and knowing Michael B. Jordan is a movie star, he's going to go on to huge things, which, by the way, he did. He then went on to Fruitvale Station and Creed.

Creed, Black Panther. I mean, he's incredible. He was like, we need Michael B. Jordan and Johnny Storm's the perfect character for him. And who cares if he's black or white? And Trent grew up in Los Angeles. And he said he wanted to cast a movie that felt more representative of the demographics of people that he saw around him when he was growing up. And it makes perfect sense. The internet goes into an uproar over the casting of a black actor in this historically white comic book role. And it was very similar to when there were rumors that Donald Glover was going to be the new Spider-Man. the internet freak the fuck out because they were like Peter Parker's white, Peter Parker's white. And now, of course, we have like Into the Spider-Verse, which is the best one, you know, that they've done. And they have, they make the point that Spider-Man can be anyone. Trank sticks by his guns. He fights for Michael B. Jordan. And Michael B. Jordan's the first actor attached to the project. Now, this doesn't stop some bad junket hosts from asking some pretty cringy questions along the way. And this is our friend Southside Steve again, in Atlanta talking to Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, who plays Michael B. Jordan's sister in the movie, Sue Storm, on the press tour.

Well, from what I understand, your brother and sister. Yeah. Yeah. Am I missing something? No. Because the obvious question is what? They were brother and sister? Yeah, wait.

You're white and you're what? You are. How does that happen? Because in the other one, they, it's just their brother and sister. Yes. And there was no back story. Just how. I think it's the same thing with this one, too.

I don't think there's any backstores. brother and a sister? No, I mean, how did that happen? There has to be some type of adoption thing going on. Hey, I don't know. Is that it? I mean, no, I don't know. They could be raised as brother and a sister.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of different family dynamics that could be without the obvious adoption. Okay. Is that a big portion of the movie that? They explain all that. You don't have to see it and check it out. You haven't seen it. So. Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's not great. What does this man want? Does he want them to be like, well, there was a scientific chemical explanation for, like, obviously someone's adopted and get over it. It's very obtuse. And it's also one line in the movie. They do explain it. And it's just so you don't even need it technically. No, it's very clear.

It makes total sense and is fine. So Michael B. Jordan and got so much heat that he ended up penning an article, I believe, on entertainment weekly or in variety. and he basically just wrote an open letter to everybody complaining about this. And he said, you need to grow up and accept that there are different looking people in the world and that we need to have more representation and good for him. And I thought also the way he handled this interview was like incredibly gracious and professional because this guy was being an asshole. Yeah, 100%.

But I do think this was, it highlights a really bright spot of the movie, which was that it had some really great casting choices that were unusual. So casting Jamie Bell as Ben. Grimm, the thing. They didn't give him a lot to do in the movie, but I liked the casting choice because he feels he's got a chip on his shoulder playing these characters. Also, for anyone who doesn't know, that is Billy Elliott. Billy Elliott, like, played the great dancer. With the fucking ballet.

Yeah. And everyone was like, oh, he's too, he's too short. He's too effeminate. He can't play Ben Grim. And by the way, comic book fans did this with Wolverine and Hugh Jackman, who ended up playing the character longer than anyone's played any comic book character ever. They said he was a rom-com star. He's a, you know, a Broadway star. He's not Wolverine. They were wrong. So then they bring in Miles Teller, uh, fresh off of an Oscar-worthy performance in Whiplash. Uh, and finally Kate Mara as Sue Storm, who I thought was perfectly fine, but apparently Josh Trank disliked. He'd wanted Allison Williams, according to some sources for the role. Really? Yeah. And this is also, there's some unsubstantiated reporting that he was cold toward

her on set. The interviews I've read with her, she, she'd wanted her. She says only positive things about the experience. She's pretty tight-lipped and professional. So the gist of it is they have Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Cable, great British actor. I mean, for young actors of that age range, it's about as strong as it can get in terms of casting. Yeah. But there's already signs of trouble on the horizon. So six months before production is set to begin, rumors are circulating that Fox is looking to drop.

Josh Trank and Simon Kinberg from the project to bring on a new writer-director team because they're not happy with the story and the script. I couldn't find any firsthand sources that say this. It was like some kind of CD websites. But what I will say is that there is evidence that Fox was desperate to cut the budget down going into production. So the original budget seems to have been about $185 million. They then changed the shoot location from Vancouver to Louisiana to take advantage of additional tax credits. So Louisiana rebated them like $30 million in the end. And then Josh Trank claims that heading into production, Fox cut the budget by an additional $30 million, forcing three key action set pieces to be removed. Now, Lizzie, how many action set pieces did it feel like this movie had in the version that you watched?

I don't know. Like, point three. I would say one, like right, the end of the movie. Fine, one. Like it's technically an action set piece. Yeah, I guess. It's unusual, right, that you'd want. a superhero movie and usually they have a few different action scenes and this kind of

actually exactly it's exactly what david said as we were watching it he was like this is the first time there's been any kind of fight or action sequence and we have 10 minutes left in the movie exactly so this does add up when you watch the final project so there's one action set piece uh in a genre that is usually known for having multiple action set pieces uh in each of their This is kind of also supported by the fact that the budget of 155 million for Fantastic Four is decently lower than other superhero films that have come out in and around that time. Collider's John Campia kind of reported as much in 2015, and I'll run a clip. The movie that Josh Trank and Fox had agreed on making included three really big action set pieces. That was all agreed upon.

It was a part of the flow of the movie. And a movie is like a puzzle. You have all the pieces in place. You start messing with pieces. Suddenly the whole puzzle can look out of whack. And they had agreed on this vision for a film or whatever. And then days before production began, Fox came in and made him pull three main action sequences out of the film. So they force him to pull out these three main action set pieces pretty last minute from the project.

And apparently there's speculation that the studios, thinking about pulling the plug on the entire thing because all of a sudden this seems like a risky investment. But I think both sides feel like we've already put in so much. We have such high sunk costs on this. We just, we're pot committed. We have to continue forward. And so I think Josh Trank is feeling like he can't back out because his career might be over. And Fox feels like they can't back out because they have these rights and this hard deadline. And so it's like a bit of a game of chicken. And neither side is willing to say, you know what? We're not feeling great about this and so they continue to push forward. So Josh Trank goes into production as this kind of detail-oriented

director, which makes sense. And this is something that causes a lot of tension with the bureaucracy, Lizzie, that you were talking about at the beginning of this project. So these are Josh Trank's words in an interview with Polygon from this year. In a studio scenario, you're basically being surrounded by veterans who are going to do a hell of a job doing exactly what it is they do. Because it's not your movie. You didn't come up with it. You didn't come up with it. You didn't create these characters. You didn't create this property. This guy was fucking nominated for Oscars. This guy has fucking made 20 movies with Robert Zemeckis. It's a fucking science fiction adventure movie. What the fuck do you need to tell them other than the direction of the

agreement between you and the studio? All Zemeckis's production designer needs to know is whether this is the take, yes or no. And so this is a dour way that he's looking at it, but I think he's absolutely right in that he's being brought in as the arbiter of a general direction. And everybody else involved has done this 100 times and he's done it once. No one's going to be impressed by the fact that he made one kind of cool movie when he's working with Oscar nominated department heads who have worked with a dozen directors, half of whom are much more successful than he is. So it puts you in a very tough position when you are the manager of a project yet you are also the least experienced and potentially least respected person on set. And this is definitely

something that we've seen in the other projects that we looked at, like Island of Dr. Murrow with Richard Stanley, for example. To make matters worse, after the movie flopped, there were a lot of reports that came out about Trank having supposedly erratic behavior on set. So there were Reddit threads claiming, like people that claimed that they were close to the project or had worked on it in some capacity saying that he came in drunken high, wouldn't talk to anybody, that he nearly got in a fist fight with Miles Teller. I looked into a lot of these claims. And to be To be blunt, they seem like they're mostly bullshit and like pretty big exaggerations. Yeah.

It seems like for the initial 72-day shoot, it's not that it was easy, but they got through it and, you know, he was fine. There was this Hollywood reporter piece that claimed that he built a black tent around his monitor and cut himself off from everyone. That's totally normal to have a black tent around your monitor so you don't have glare and it's called video village so you can see things. So I think it's funny that there are these like, you know, people saying like, He's lost his mind. He's like, you know, he won't come out of video village. Like, there are directors who direct via megaphone. For example, Joel Schumacher, and this is just one of my favorite clips of George Clooney

describing working with Joel Schumacher on Batman and Robin about his weird directing style on that project. There was a directing of Joel Schumacher. He's very funny, man, very tall, very sort of eccentric. And he would direct with a speaker and a microphone in a speaker. Usually directors will come up and say, hey, I know, he'll be like, okay. And you'd hear this, you know, giant booming voice. And I'm bolted into this suit.

I can't move. And he would literally go, and he would direct you like as if you would have some emotional scene. He would go, okay, people, all right. George, your parents are dad. You have nothing to live for. So there are a lot of unusual directing styles. He's so good.

And, you know, everything I can. figure out in here. He may have been in over his head, and there were some problems on set, but it doesn't seem like it was anything more extreme than what we've heard of on a lot of troubled productions. Yeah, there also tends to be a real aversion to sort of like emotional distress on especially big budget projects, but anything where you're working, and that can become very hard when the thing that you're working on is a creative endeavor. Exactly. Here's what we do know about what was tough on production. Josh Trank was so freaked out about fanboys coming after him, mostly about casting Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, that he was getting death threats.

And he bought a gun, a 38 special revolver that he kept on his nightstand while he was sleeping. And he brought his dogs with him to production so he would have some type of company slash, you know, protection, even though they're all small dogs while he was there. During production, one of his dogs died. It ate a bottle of vitamins while he wasn't home and it was poisoned. So he lost his dog in the middle of production. He's dealing with all this pressure. And to be fair, he did describe his communication with Emma Watts, the president of Fox at the time, as being incredibly tense. He says, like, reports out of the DMZ in Korea, there was never any bad news per se, but the general feeling was that war could erupt at any moment.

But I think the general answer is like there's a lot of people online who wanted to say Josh Trank was a disaster on set, all this stuff. I don't buy that. I buy that he might have been in over his head. and he was maybe struggling to make decisions, but the more fantastic stuff just seems like we want to create this narrative that's more salacious than it is. What we do know is that the trouble really exploded when they got done with principal photography,

so they shoot for 72 days. They don't have a complete movie yet, but they have planned reshoots, and then Fox sees the first cut of Josh Tranks movie. And they're like, oh my God, this is creepy. It makes us uncomfortable. It isn't fun. It's not marketable.

And Josh Trank's like, yeah, that's exactly the movie. I told you I was going to make. And Fox is like, oh, no, what did we do? And they are freaked out because they have a hard release date and they don't have a movie that they can release. So they go into reshoots, but now they're reshooting not just the third act, but a lot of the movie. And the problem is... Yeah, I was going to say, when you told me at the top of this that there were reshoots, I expected that I was going to be seeing them in the latter half of the movie. You very clearly see a reshoot within...

I want to say eight to ten minutes of this movie starting. And you can tell because people's hair is changing throughout the movie. And so the problem is that the characters had all moved on to other projects. Miles Teller specifically had moved on to Wardogs and was really tan after shooting in Miami. So they were having to put on a lot of makeup. So he didn't seem as tan all of a sudden. The Kate Mara's blonde wig just gets out of control in the second half of the movie. That's what I'm talking about though.

It's out of control eight minutes in. There's a scene where she already has it. Yeah. And so the problem is that. at the studio at this point after seeing the cut has completely lost faith in Josh Trank to guide this production forward. So they've effectively booted him off of the movie while still allowing him to be on the movie. It's January of 2015. They've got this August release date. It's originally, it was originally March, but they pushed it. And they don't really have an ending or a movie,

and all their characters have other obligations and new haircuts. And so Hutch Parker and Simon Kinberg bring in a new team of writers and they rework the entire movie. And so one of the big issues is that movie lacks humor, so they do an entire humor pass on the script. Josh Trank has kept around, but he's basically given no authority or decision-making power. He's brought to set, and literally they have to turn to him and say, are you okay with this? And he says he just started saying yes to everything, so he wouldn't get fired completely off the project. So Trank is pumping out his own material. He's writing pages frantically on the side, separate from this writing team that he's sending to Fox,

trying to keep his idea for the movie intact, and Fox is just ignoring the pages that are coming in because they need to just get this movie fixed in some way that they can release it. Right. So at a certain point, the DGA has to step in and negotiate between Trank and the studio. And basically what they agree on is that Josh is going to edit his own version of the movie in parallel with a new editor that Fox has brought in, Stephen Rivkin, who cut Avatar. And they're just going to be the Rivkin cut and the Trank cut, and they're going to test them both with audiences. And Josh Trank's doing his cut. He's doing his cut. He's working really hard on it. He edited his first film. Like, he was an editor also. And in January of 2015, he realizes his cut's never going to be held up side by side because the studio is planning all of their rewrites and reshoots around the Rivkin edit already. Right. And so all of the holes in the Rivkin edit are what they're planning on. Here's what Trank described being on set for the reshoots was like, quote, it was like being castrated.

You're standing there and you're basically watching the producers block out scenes five minutes ahead of when you get there. You have editors hired by the studio deciding the sequence of shots that are going to construct whatever is going on and what it is they need. And then, because they know you're being nice, they'll sort of be nice back to you and say, well, does that sound good? You can say yes or no. This time I said yes. So at a certain point, he realizes none of this is going to see the light of day. Fantastic Four was initially slated to release in March of 2015, but it did push to August. August is a dump. month for movies. It's summer tent pole movies that aren't going to be able to compete in July and June and Memorial Day with the really big blockbusters. So Fox, I think, is obviously aware that they don't have something great on their hands. The cast participates in a press tour. They face some

Johnny Storm racism as we saw and some very very strange sexism with Kate Mara. And let's go back to Southside Steve, our favorite Atlanta radio host, talking to Kate Mara during that same junket. Hey, don't get you wrong. I love you in a shooter. Oh, thanks, Ben. Well, you're right. You're way, way hot. Why you cut the hair? I am sorry. I know you don't like it. I can tell. No, you look. Your hair was beautiful. No, no, it's not too. No, no, it's not true. No, you look great. Short hair or long hair, but the fact the long hair was excellent. And yours, Billy. Is that, is that weird to me out that he's doing that? It's creepy. me out. Which part?

The hair cut. Oh my God. So if you couldn't hear that, that was Southside Steve first commenting on Kate Mara having cut her hair short and how hot she is. Oh, I feel ill. So Kate Mara had to not only be in a movie that she actually to this day hasn't seen and was a bit of a flop, but then she had to go promote it and deal with guys like Southside Steve. So at this point, none of the cast have seen the film. Josh Trank hasn't actually seen the cut that's going to get released in theaters. And on the day of the release, let's get back to this tweet, right?

At the beginning, I read this tweet that seems kind of like offensively self-destructive. But having gone through this process, we now know that he's lost every project he's been attached to. He effectively got booted off of his own movie halfway through. They shot a new version that's not the version that they agreed to let him make. And his name is still attached to it. And he reads a review of the movie that says, film students should watch this movie and look at Trank's work as a lesson in what not to do. And he realizes that this movie that he didn't really even direct entirely.

He's definitely responsible for a lot of it. And it's, you know, he made the decision to do it and to stick with it. But he realizes that this is all the sudden his legacy. And he fires up Twitter and he composes this tweet to distance himself from the project. And he's effectively, I think without realizing it because he quickly deleted the tweet. He's effectively telling audiences that he, the director, doesn't support the version of the movie. that's about to be released. Some box office analysts estimate that that tweet costs the studio $10 million in first

weekend box office draw because historically, comic book fans are less allergic to negative reactions from critics than they are from negative reactions from cast members and the creators of the movie. They want to know that the people that make the movie are as passionate about the movie as they are. That's more important to them than whether or not a movie. critic gets it at the end of the day. So this sends Trank into a period of libel lawsuits, breach of contract disputes, NDAs,

all of these things that would dominate his life for the next couple of years. You know, he loses a lot of money to these lawsuits. All the projects dry up. Fantastic Four Tanks loses the studio $100 million. At 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, it's the worst reviewed modern superhero film tied with Catwoman. Oh, wow. And Kate Mara hasn't seen the movie to date.

And what I think is interesting is by Trank's own admission, a quote, Trank cut of the movie doesn't exist because they didn't have a third act when they filmed the portion that he did. But it does seem like he delivered through production a version that was close to what he had initially pitched and that ultimately Fox got cold feet about it. But to wrap things up, I want to play a clip from Josh Trank talking about. his time on the project and kind of what it led to because this year actually just a week ago Josh Trank's third movie released a movie called Capone starring Tom Hardy as the famous mobster

Al Capone in the late stages of his life here is Josh Trank talking about Fantastic Four and then ultimately what it led to I was had gone from a place in my life where I had experienced for a couple of years what you could only describe as like the height of success of success in Hollywood and yeah and it was for me a it was a surreal experience like I wish I could say that I was more emotionally equipped during that experience to have sort of you know to say because nobody wants to hear that you had like your first movie came out and it was number one and it was successful and you were super emo about it like nobody wants to hear that like that's

really annoying. I mean, it's annoying for me to hear about it. But I was. I wasn't ready for it. And it all kind of freaked me out. But in a way that I was too stubborn to ever want to admit to anybody that I wasn't ready to sort of like go through that odyssey. But I was, I had it. And I, I had all these huge projects and involved with like, I felt like I was, you know, when Star Wars episode seven, a few years before it came out, I knew that, Han Solo was going to die. I was walking around. I was walking around for two years because I was working on Star Wars.

Oh, I was there. Yeah, I was, I'm sorry. I was working on a Star Wars movie going up to Lucasfilm for two years, two and a half years before that movie came out. And so I knew for two and a half years that Han Solo was going to die in the new Star Wars movie at a time when everybody was clamoring for any inside info. and they kept a really good tight lid on that. The reason being is the fear of God.

Like, I was terrified. The minute that they told me what was going to be the stories going on with the Star Wars films, I, like, almost didn't want to know. I wanted to unknow it as soon as I found out. Because it's terrifying information. I also felt like, like, I can't tell anybody.

This is too powerful of information. So I was in this headspace for a long time, and then suddenly, Fantastic Four comes out, and I'm just, alone in eerie silence in my backyard. Nobody wants to talk to me, let alone give me all the most powerful secrets behind what's going on in all these big franchise movies. There's no money coming in. I'm toxic. Like I said, I'm running out of money. All of my relationships in my life had just sort of ended. And I was sitting out there for a couple of months, just chain

smoking cigarettes and just confused with my own identity from having spent the last many months of my life reading stories about me that I myself didn't really recollect the same way. And at one point, it was just a seed in my head of stories that I had once read about Al Capone a couple years after he was released from Alcatraz due to his health issues and how he was just sitting alone in his backyard, puffing on a cigar, alone with his whole life of being Al Capone so far behind him and nothing to identify him in that current situation as being the Al Capone that we would have known him as. And because of his, you know, the mental deterioration that was going on in his mind at that time, I just kept thinking about what would it be

like to be Al Capone in that moment, if he flipped on the radio and heard a radio play about Al Capone, with that Edward G. Robinson voice and all of those things. Like, what would be his emotional response to that? Yeah. And my gut told me his emotional response to that would be fear. So, Trank wrote Capone shortly after Fantastic Four. I find him to be a very sympathetic character, Josh Trank, despite everything. And I, as I went through this process of researching this movie, you know, there was the Chadenfreude reaction that we all have at first of like, oh my God, look at this garbage fire on the side of the road.

Like, let's all rubber neck addict. And the more I read about it and the more I tried to dig through what was true and not true. And then when I finally got to some of these interviews with Josh Trank, you know, reflecting on what had happened only five years prior to him, you know, he'd be. became the laughing stock of the industry and the internet overnight. And not only did he, he wasn't starting from neutral, he was starting from the highest possible inverted point of, you know, he was the king of the town for a moment. There's no way to not feel bad for him in the situation.

I mean, it's like everything that you've laid out, first of all, makes what I am not happy about having watched last night make a little bit more sense. And it would be so hard to have something that you're obviously working your absolute hardest at trying to create the best product to have it come out and be something that you're barely even responsible for and not like not in control of for someone who sounds like they like to be in control of things that's an absolute nightmare. I think so. And I think that it's fascinating that at the end of the day when he found himself alone smoking a cigarette in his backyard, the person that he weirdly sympathized and empathized with was Al Capone.

who's dying of neurotic of a neural syphilis at that point in time in his life reflecting and who effectively was a pariah who at one point had been held in high esteem by at least some people and all of a sudden was worthless to everyone and that is clearly something that resonates with josh trink and he made this movie called capone and the consensus amongst it seems like the critics of the world i have not watched the movie yet is like it or don't like it josh trank made the movie he wanted to make which is not what he got to do on Fantastic Four. And so the positive beat to end with on this one is Josh Trank didn't sell out and he made his movie, whereas Fox sold out and now Disney owns their ass. And so, you know, good on Josh Trank to continue to try to make his movies at the end of the day. And obviously, I know that he's in a privileged position to do so. And there are a lot of marginalized folks that don't even get one chance. And so it's not amazing that another white.

guy gets a second chance in Hollywood. But I respect him for sticking through it, you know, and coming back and continue to work. Because I think there would be a lot of people that would leave forever. And that might be myself included. Yeah, me too. So, as someone who really, really didn't like this movie a lot more than I did, what went right for this movie from your perspective? I mean, I guess we'll say what went right. I'll harken back to the casting of Michael B. Jordan. he is so clearly a movie star and it's great that he, you know, had the opportunity to be in this movie, even though it is not a great movie. I'm glad that it happened and then it didn't stop him from

moving on to Creed or Black Panther or any of the sort of superstardom that he's moved on to today. Very good. I would agree my what went right would also be the casting, just in general of the film. I thought the casting was really strong. Also, uh, Reggie Kathy as the as Dr. Storm, the father figure of like the wire and stuff. He's great. And Tim Blake Nelson. Like they had some really great performers in this movie. Um, I have a weird backhanded compliment for the film on what went right, which is I find the fantastic four to be a completely uncompelling group of superheroes. And I'm kind of fine with the fact that this movie seems to have buried them for good. And, uh, I don't think we need another fantastic four movie. No,

I know they're going to do one at some point. But I do think that in a weird way, Josh Trank may have proven that, like, there isn't a great way to make these characters work. Like, they couldn't make it work in a hokey way. And then it seems like they couldn't make it work in a gritty way. So maybe these guys just aren't adaptable at the end of the day. They work in comic book form, but they don't seem to work on film. Anyway, that is our episode for this week, Fantastic Four, the Josh.

Frank film. Go see Josh Strang's new movie, Capone. It's streaming on various services. Remember, if you have any suggestions of movies that you would like us to cover, please get our contact info from the show notes and shoot us an email. And if you have any corrections to send us, please do. Thank you guys for listening. To support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website what went wrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.