14 DAY TRIAL // You know something is bound to disappoint when even the person in charge of it publicly disowns it. “Fantastic Four” is scheduled for wide release today, Friday, August 7, 2015, but director Josh Trank just gave moviegoing audiences a clue as to what to expect from it.
Hint: it’s not what he would have wanted them to see, which means “Fantastic Four” isn’t the movie he set out to make. Needless to say, when a director speaks out against his or her own movie, especially on a huge platform like Twitter, it can’t be good.
Trank is new to the game, commits huge faux-pas
That “Fantastic Four” would be, at the very best, not as well received as Fox expected, and at the worst, a huge flop, was in the cards weeks ago, when the trailers kept coming and reactions to them got increasingly more negative.
Despite the heavy amount of CGI and the money invested in the film, it simply didn’t seem to promise anything new or thrilling. This, in a context in which we already know that most movie trailers are misleading and even the worst B-movie can be made to look good in the official trailer.
The other day, leading man Miles Teller acknowledged bad buzz about “Fantastic Four” and even took the first step towards bracing himself for impact: he said in an interview that “these movies” rarely opened to good reviews on movie reviews portals like Rotten Tomatoes. He was wrong: for example, all Marvel releases from MCU have ratings of 70% Fresh and upwards.
He also stressed that “Fantastic Four” was different from other releases of the kind, in that it wasn’t mindless, soulless popcorn action. Again, he was wrong: initial reviews of the film claimed that it was just that.
Trank is also bracing for impact, tweeting that the movie we’ll get in theaters starting tonight is not the movie he made. He deleted the post within minutes, but it had already been screencapped (see the screenshot in the gallery).
“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,” Trank wrote.
Moviemaking isn’t just an act of creation, it’s also a business
Trank is a relatively new director, so probably no one told him not to speak out against his own work and the studio that backs it. He rose to critical acclaim with the indie “Chronicle,” and Fox took a huge leap of faith with him at the helm of “Fantastic Four.”
Because he was new, he was probably also paid less, so don’t applaud Fox just yet for giving a young artist the chance to sink his teeth into something big. He was also offered probably close to zero creative control over his work.
If “Fantastic Four” isn’t the movie Trank made (and it’s not, clearly), it’s because the studio called all the shots in the creative process. This isn’t new and public feuds between moviemakers and studio bosses are actually more frequent than you’d imagine.
This happens because moviemaking isn’t just an act of creation. For studio bosses, it’s first and foremost a business, and there are only a few directors who actually get to make the movies they want in partnership with a big studio.
That’s why we have indie releases, as Trank had to learn the hard way.
