'Fantastic Four' Director Speaks His Mind on Twitter -- Oops

Here we are, looking for a plot line and a new director!

Fantastic Four's director Josh Trank apparently is taking aim at his own career's foot. Can we say

Trank is Toast.

We all heard the stories... that Fantastic Four director Josh Trank made such a mess of things that Disney dropped him from a future gig directing a Star Wars film. He later said he pulled himself out of one of the coolest, biggest gigs that a director could possibly get due to creative differences. Riiight.

We heard the rumors that other production staff had to step up to put the finishing, editorial touches on the new Fantastic Four film.

Then we heard that Fox had put restrictions on when Fantastic Four reviews could come out. That's never good, not when a studio does not trust their own end-product.

Now Trank spoke out momentarily on Twitter about the bad reviews of his film. He tweeted the following:

“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.”

But reports say that as soon as he Tweeted this brash statement, he deleted it. But you know how it goes... once on the web, always on the web. And folks saw his quote and snapped screen shots.

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First, I believe that he had a good vision. We saw Chronicle and he did a great job there and fans of the film NEED to see a sequel... or prequel. In Trank we trust. (In this matter)

Plus I am not sure what happened between his vision and the end product. But Hollywood is the last place you should be bashing your bosses or peers.

Hollywood is all about the support that each party can give to the other. When someone steps outside of that sphere of support, it puts one on the outside looking in.  It's like when NASCAR driver Jeremy Mayfield sued a team owner and suddenly, he found himself having to sponsor his own team because no one wanted someone who was not a team player.

When you are seen as someone who is not a team player, it gets oddly harder to nab good jobs after that.

Or more bluntly, bad mouth your peers, you're on the outs. It is time to get that gas station job.

I don't get what's up with Trank, from the rumors of his difficulty to work with to this. Maybe they are in fact were having such creative differences and this latest travesty of a Fantastic Four film (10% on Rotten Tomatoes and even fans are bashing it, with a 34%!) is the result of those differences.

Maybe he became difficult to work with because he was upset about some major changes that Fox wanted to put on his vision. It's not like Fox does not have a track record for interfering with a producer. (Can we say Firefly and Joss Whedon?) They always seem to want to put some special stamp on things folks do.

Or... and this is a stretch while I play devil's advocate here, is this just a calculated press bit? Because if anything, the line goes "Any press is good press."

Then there's this on ScreenCrush:

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Trank’s Chronicle writer Max Landis had this to say on what Trank went through on Fantastic Four:

    As a writer, I’ve been lucky to work on many, many projects, and seen how different and how hard each road can be, for five and a half years. Josh didn’t get that chance, and his second major project, after one with total freedom, was one with intense oversight. So I don’t think anyone’s wrong or right, necessarily.

It’s easy to empathize with Trank, the young filmmaker who was handed a major franchise and found himself facing opposition at every turn. Still, this is only one half of the story. For all we know, the studio salvaged an even worse film. If you want to dip a toe in the grimy pool of rumor-mongering, many of the on-set problems with Fantastic Four have been attributed directly to Trank.-
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Either way, somehow Fox has completely muddled the Fantastic Four franchise. The very same franchise that was the cornerstone of Marvel in the early days. If Marvel can produce a great team oriented story, I think it is time for Fox to either do the same thing Sony has done with Spider-Man, and let Marvel do the writing, or just quit making FF films every "x" years to keep the character rights. Give them back to Marvel so we can see a good FF film.

Sigh.

Either way, I think Trank is toast in the industry.  Then again... if Megan Fox can be rehired by Michael Bay, then maybe Trank has one more chance.

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Update:

More news is coming out saying that director Trank truly was combative with cast, crew and such, and that it has become more known that yes, Disney did not like what they were seeing and felt they could not trust one of their Star Wars films with him. But these bits also come from extenuating circumstances, where Fox was making huge changes to his original vision of this reboot.

Basically, it sounds like a fail on both sides. There is a great article that covers this from ComicBookMovie site.

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