Summary

• Josh Trank's career began with the success of Chronicle but was quickly derailed by the disastrous Fantastic Four reboot in 2015.
• Despite initial promise, studio conflicts and reshoots led to Trank losing control of Fantastic Four and damaging his career.
• Trank's fallout from the Fantastic Four debacle led to being blacklisted in Hollywood, despite recent return with the film Capone.

Because the disastrous commercial and critical reception for the 2015 Fantastic Four reboot cast such an enduring shadow over the reputation of the film’s director, Josh Trank, it’s easy to forget the great potential that he demonstrated before Fantastic Four essentially destroyed his career. Trank made one of the most impressive feature directorial debuts of the past 20 years with the 2012 found-footage superhero thriller film Chronicle, which grossed over $125 million at the worldwide box office against a production cost of approximately $15 million.

With Chronicle, Trank, who was 27 when Chronicle was released, became the youngest director to have a film that opened in the number one position at the domestic box office, followed by Steven Spielberg, who was 28 when Spielberg accomplished this feat with Jaws in 1975.

Moreover, even before Chronicle was released, Trank was initially courted by various Hollywood studios to direct various high-profile films, including Ready Player One for Warner Bros. and Venom for Sony. However, in July 2012, the director decided to reunite with 20th Century Fox, the studio behind Chronicle, and direct Fantastic Four, despite the fact that Trank’s only point of reference for the franchise was the eponymous 1990s animated television series.

Indeed, his fundamental incompatibility with the franchise and the studio’s preordained vision for Fantastic Four heralded a contentious relationship, culminating one day before the film’s release, with a now infamous renegade tweet that forever altered Trank’s once promising career.

Josh Trank Trashed Fantastic Four on Twitter

Josh Trank sought to infuse Fantastic Four with the same dark, realistic approach he brought to the filming of Chronicle. For this purpose, the director chose Jeremy Slater, whom he had previously collaborated with on an unproduced script, as his co-writer for Fantastic Four. However, Slater’s conventional, pragmatic, studio-friendly creative approach to Fantastic Four immediately became at odds with Trank’s dark, gritty vision.

Trank’s approach, which amounted to a re-imagining of Chronicle, also met with disapproval from studio 20th Century Fox, with whom the director had multiple disagreements during the filming of Fantastic Four. Moreover, the filming of Fantastic Four, which commenced in May 2014 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was accompanied by reports of Trank’s erratic behavior and an overall perception that the filmmaker was overwhelmed by the challenges of overseeing a big-budget film like Fantastic Four, which carried a production cost of over $150 million.

By January 2015, Trank had virtually lost control of the film. After viewing his original cut of Fantastic Four with great dissatisfaction, Fox ordered reshoots, including a completely revised ending, which was conceived by producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker. On August 6, 2015, the day before Fantastic Four entered wide theatrical release, Trank unleashed a fateful tweet in which he expressed great unhappiness towards the released film while lamenting the removal of his own purportedly excellent cut of the film. While he deleted the message shortly after it was posted, the damage was done.

Trank Lost the Chance to Direct a Star Wars Film

In June 2014, amid the commencement of filming of Fantastic Four, Disney and Lucasfilm announced that Josh Trank, who was still basking in the glow of the success of Chronicle, had been signed to direct a standalone Star Wars film featuring Boba Fett.

In making this announcement, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy practically gushed about Trank, whom Kennedy referred to as an incredible talent who possessed a great imagination and a sense of innovation. However, this relationship soured in the spring of 2015, when the director, amid the reports of chaos and discord during the filming of Fantastic Four, was asked to forego his planned April 2015 appearance at the Star Wars Celebration convention, where Trank was supposed to discuss details of the would-be Boba Fett film.

While Trank initially stated that he departed the project over creative differences, he later admitted that he’d been essentially fired. More recently, the director bluntly stated that he quit before he was fired. Moreover, Trank also declared that he was done making blockbuster films.

Trank Has Been Black-Listed in Hollywood

Upon its theatrical release, Fantastic Four, which was projected to gross between $40 million and $50 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office, had an opening-weekend domestic gross of $25.6 million, one of the lowest openings ever for a big-budget superhero film.

Fantastic Four bombed at the box office and finished its theatrical with a domestic total of $56.1 million and a worldwide total of $167.9 million. In comparison, the 2005 Fantastic Four film grossed approximately $56.1 domestically in its opening weekend of release. However, while the dismal box-office performance of Fantastic Four resulted in a theatrical loss of roughly $100 million and put the franchise in hibernation for nearly a decade, the cost to Josh Trank’s career was much more enduring and severe. Beyond the film’s commercial and critical failure, his unprecedented reaction to the movie via Twitter made the director unemployable in Hollywood.

Following the release of Fantastic Four, Trank virtually disappeared until 2020, when he reemerged with his third feature directorial outing, the biographical drama film Capone, in which Tom Hardy plays the eponymous gangster Al Capone. The film, which was released exclusively digitally amid the pandemic, received mixed reviews.

However, while Capone was received with general commercial and critical indifference, the recent announcement of an upcoming Fantastic Four film, which is set to be released approximately 10 years after the release of the 2015 reboot, has triggered a renewed focus on the 2015 reboot and on Trank, who is about to turn 40 and is presently off Twitter. Fantastic Four is available to stream on Max.