Josh Trank Reviews Fantastic Four on Letterboxd

Fox’s Marvel efforts haven’t always been terrific. The studio’s two Deadpool movies were pretty well received, but the X-Men franchise was wildly inconsistent following Bryan Singer’s first two films.

X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were arguably low points, as were X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, while Josh Boone’s The New Mutants is still idling on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust. Days Of Future Past and Logan still stand out amongst Fox’s most recent Marvel offerings before it was acquired by Disney – and who knows what Kevin Feige et al have planned for those properties in the future?

A man that witnessed first hand the problems Fox had “getting in its own way” with its Marvel instalments was Chronicle director Josh Trank, who was brought in to reboot the Fantastic Four films. Released to a poor box office and grim reviews in 2015, there were reports of huge reshoots and trouble behind the scenes of Fantasic Four that included clashes between Fox and Trank, whose ‘body horror’ vision for the film didn’t seem to fly well with X-Men boss Simon Kinberg, and Trank was said to have very little involvement in Fantastic Four‘s messy third act.

Clearly in an honest and upset mood in the days before Fantastic Four came out, Trank posted “a year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though” on Twitter, before deleting his Tweet. Now, he’s taken to Letterboxd to look back at the film, and give it a brutal review.

This is what Trank had to say about his own film, four years on from Fantastic Four‘s release:

“The movie is ALRIGHT. I was expecting it to be much worse than it was. I literally haven’t seen it since like two weeks before it came out, and I was in a heavily fucking traumatized state of mind. Why? Eh, save that for another time.

“Great cast. Everyone in the film is a great actor, and overall there is a movie in there, somewhere. And that cast deserves to be in THAT movie. Everyone who worked on Fant4stic clearly wanted to be making THAT movie. But…. ultimately… It wasn’t.

“Did I make that movie they deserved to be in? To be honest… I can’t tell. What I can tell is there are TWO different movies in one movie competing to be that movie. Is there a #releasethetrankcut? Doesn’t matter. I’m not Zack Snyder.

“Zack Snyder is a storied, iconic, legendary filmmaker who has been knocking it out of the fucking park since I was in high school. Me? Then? I was 29 years old, making my 2nd film, in a situation more complicated than anything a 2nd time filmmaker should’ve walked into.

“That said… I don’t regret any of it. It’s a part of me. And I just hope Peyton Reed makes the next Fantastic Four and crushes it. And that I get a cameo.”

Trank’s next film, Fonzo, stars Tom Hardy as notorious gangster Al Capone, and focuses on his battle with syphilis in the years following his release from prison. The movie was recently pushed back to 2020.