The FANTASTIC FOUR Debacle: Rumours, Blame And Comic Books

Fantastic Four has finally hit screens – and it’s tanking – it looks set to gross less than $30 million for the weekend, a low sum for a $120 million superhero film. The reviews aren’t good and at this point everyone is starting to point fingers. I get the feeling that nobody is going to come out of this unscathed but sadly it would seem like director Josh Trank is going to be the fall guy.

Trank was getting a bad rap even when the film was in production, with all sorts of nasty rumours swirling around which allegedly led to him losing a Star Wars directing gig. Then came stories that Matthew Vaughn had taken over to direct reshoots, the cost of which meant that the film’s 3D conversion had to be scrapped. This bad buzz didn’t help as the film neared its release date. The knives were out, the sharks were circling and the wolves were ready to pounce. Then Trank fired-off the below tweet:

This was either a brave move or career suicide (he did delete it) – but critics believed that the film’s unevenness supports Trank’s words. Having said that – it’s not cool to slam your movie just before it opens, especially when it’s already suffering from a serious case of bad buzz.

The previous Fantastic Four movies weren’t very good and the scuttlebutt is that this new film was only made so that the rights wouldn’t revert back to Marvel. It looks like that might just happen now, as it’s unlikely 20th Century Fox would go ahead with a sequel and it’s probably too soon to reboot (again). Marvel might not even want to touch the poisoned chalice but one thing’s for sure – this was far from a fantastic experience for those involved.