Ouch. 30-year-old director Josh Trank gets the full studio backs away treatment , including firing him from the second standalone Star Wars movie, after Fox execs became alarmed by his erratic behavior while making the Fantastic Four Reboot:
A Fox spokesman says the studio is “very happy with the movie and we can’t wait for audiences to see it” but acknowledges, “There were definitely some bumps in the road.”
Among those bumps: Trank has several small dogs who were left in a rented house in New Orleans while the film was shooting there. According to sources, as much as $100,000 worth of damage was done to the property. A source says the production considers any destruction of the property to be Trank’s responsibility.
Citing Trank’s work on the 2012 found-footage superhero movie Chronicle, an insider says: “No question there’s talent there. You can’t do Chronicle by accident.” But Trank seemed “like one of these kids who comes to the NBA with all the talent and none of the character-based skills to handle it. There’s equipment he doesn’t yet have.”
The report by THR’s Kim Masters and Borys Kit says that Trank became incommunicative while making FF, and producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker took on some of the heavy lifting of putting the pieces of the movie together. They also had to oversee some reshoots just last month. Kinberg is produced the first Gareth Edwards directed Star Wars movie, and blabbed about Trank’s problems to Kathleen Kennedy and the rest is history.
This is a pretty thorough burying of Trank’s career by studio execs, a stunning shunning reserved for only the most severe cases. The dogs trashing the house story confirms rumors that were going around back at the beginning of the year that Trank had some property problems with the locals.
Fantastic Four opens on August 7th and stars Miles Teller as Reed Richards, Kate Mara as Sue Storm, Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm and Toby Kebbel as “Victor Domashev,” an angry blogger who writers online as Doctor Doom.
The film has already engendered a lot of bad buzz, maybe because the first two Fox FF movies were so lame, and this rebot is preventing MArvel Studios from using the FF in the MCU. It does seem to be a different take on the FF. I admit, I was a bit surprised by the scene where J. Jonah Jameson comes in and berates Reed Richards, repeatedly asking him if the tachyons are “ahead or behind.”
I work in theater, not film, but I can promise you that having to worry about the powerful people’s pets is always an unwelcome pain in the ass.
This movie is totally going to Trank. ;-)
It used to be routine for directors to get drunk and have fistfights on the set (John Ford, John Huston, Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, etc.). Or to torment actors until the star punched him out, as Robert Mitchum did to Otto Preminger … or, more recently, as George Clooney did to David O. Russell.
This guy’s property damage problems aren’t very excited by comparison.
I didn’t believe the crazy internet rumor that Doctor Doom would be a blogger who would say things like “Epic fail, Reed Richards!” That was just too stupid to be true. . . until it turned out to be true. That was the final nail in the coffin. I have no more intention of seeing this Fantastic Four movie than I did in seeing the Frank Miller Spirit movie (and the Spirit was such a failure that it drove Frank Miller into hiding and he has never spoken about it since). Josh Trank? Meet Frank Miller.
Definitely avoid anyone with those little shitty dogs.
Sounds like studio excuses to remove an artist, and replace him/her with corporate shills.
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