Do you remember Fantastic Four? No, I'm not talking about Fantastic Four (2005) with Jessica Alba and a pre-super soldier serum Chris Evans, I'm talking about Fantastic Four (2015) with Kate Mara and a pre-vibranium Black Panther suit Michael B. Jordan. You know, the one that tanked in theaters? Well, the film's director Joshua Trank surprised us all with an open and honest review of his own movie on the popular review app, Letterboxd.
"The movie is ALRIGHT," Trank writes in his two-star review, "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 f*cking traumatized state of mind. Why? Eh, save that for another time." Trank heaps praise on the stars, writing "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."
The road to creating Fantastic Four was a long and arduous one for Trank, who was reportedly blindsided by Fox days before shooting began. Allegedly, Fox and Trank agreed to make a certain kind of Fantastic Four film, until Fox reached out days before production began to inform Trank that the three main action sequences in the film were cut. What followed was a bevy of interference on behalf of the studio, and Trank was reportedly fired after the shoot was complete and didn't touch any of the film's edits. He alludes to this in his review: "What I can say is there are TWO different movies in one movie competing to be that movie." By "that movie" Trank means one worthy of the stellar cast.
After a nod to the #RelasetheSnyderCut trend, Trank ends his review with an endorsement for Ant-Man's Peyton Reed to direct the next Fantastic Four film and a request for a cameo. Considering how Trank's experience with Fox was so horrible that he cited it as the reason for backing out of a Star Wars spinoff, it's nice to see he's found a way to laugh about it now.
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