Filmmaker Josh Trank says he would “gladly” donate to a GoFundMe campaign to erase his infamous Fantastic Four movie reboot from existence - if such a campaign were possible, of course.
Fantastic Four was the source of constant rumors about behind-the-scenes problems throughout the entirety of its production, with Trank being at the center of many of the issues that were said to plague the film. The rumors included conflicts on the set between Trank and Miles Teller and Trank’s supposed behavior costing him the director’s chair of the Star Wars anthology film about Boba Fett. The resulting movie was so widely derided that it won the Razzie for “Worst Picture” of 2015 and the actors who have worked on the film have been outspoken about its shortcomings.
Trank has also been vocal about his dislike for Fantastic Four, due to how his vision for the story was altered by executive veto and how his version of the movie would have been far superior if he had been allowed to make the movie that he had signed on for. Trank recently made a comment on Twitter that was responding to a post about a Kickstarter that wants to remove the rat from the end of The Departed, where he defended Martin Scorsese’s choice to use the rat in the film. When another Twitter user made a joke about Trank following their GoFundMe to erase the Fantastic Four movie from existence, Trank responded accordingly.
Twitter isn’t the only place where Josh Trank has publically disavowed his association with Fantastic Four, as he had previously redacted the movie from his Instagram page, leaving only a line of asterisks in place of the original name.
The Fantastic Four might be the first family of Marvel Comics, but they have had terrible luck when it comes to screen adaptations, with the first Fantastic Four movie existing only to keep hold of a license agreement, while the two Fantastic Four movies from the mid-’00s were criticized for their poor quality and for failing to launch the characters into mainstream success in the same way that the Spider-Man and X-Men movies had done during the same time period.
The Disney-Fox deal is due to be completed in 2019, which means that it will be possible for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU and that the burden of making a good movie based on the team will fall to Kevin Feige - assuming that the higher-ups at Disney won’t just ignore the team altogether.
More: Ant-Man Director Details His Unmade Fantastic Four Movie
Source: Josh Trank
