‘Fantastic Four’ Director Josh Trank Disturbing On-Set Behavior Has Been Made Public

So as most of our reader’s know at this point, the new Fantastic Four reboot may be one of the worst comic book adaptations ever made.  It scored so low with the critics and performed so poorly at the box office that Fox may drop the sequel entirely.  Now, as the film is being publicly shunned, the director of the movie, Josh Trunk, has had his bizarre in-production behavior outted.

According to Cinema Insider, some of the strangest of these were:

  • Trank apparently didn’t produce good enough material to ever create a film which could be salvaged, and refused help from the studio and producers. “He holed up in a tent and cut himself off from everybody,” one insider tells the site. “He built a black tent around his monitor. He was extremely withdrawn. [He] would go to his trailer and he wouldn’t interact with anybody.”

  • While Fox initially had faith in Trank’s vision of a grounded and gritty Fantastic Four movie, it appears as if the filmmaker took that too far as he forced a gloomy tone on the movie by obsessing over the cast’s performance. “During takes, he would be telling [cast members] when to blink and when to breathe. He kept pushing them to make the performance as flat as possible.”

  • You may remember some time ago that Josh Trank and his dogs were accused of causing as much as $100,000 worth of damage to a house which was rented for him in Baton Rouge by Fox. After landlord Martin Padial made moves to evict the director,“photographs of the landlord’s family that were in the house were defaced. Padial made a complaint to the local sheriff’s department and filed a civil suit in Louisiana that is sealed.The sheriff’s department says the case was ‘closed as a civil matter between landlord and tenant.’”

  • Before you completely blame Trank for how Fantastic Four turned out, one source says that the movie was always “ill-conceived, made for the wrong reasons and there was no vision behind the property.” Fox were terrified of losing the rights to Marvel and the reboot was in chaos before shooting even started. They “were afraid of losing the rights so they pressed forward and didn’t surround [Trank] with help or fire him. They buried their heads in the sand.”

  • While they initially considered firing Trank, Fox had faith in the director and believed he could be the next J.J. Abrams. However, as it became apparent that he couldn’t cope with the movie, it was simply to late to ditch him. “How do you ask someone to take over half of a movie shot by someone else? You either hire somebody desperate for work or you [start over], write off pretty much the whole budget and lose the cast.” Fair point!

  • Those reshoots have been blamed for the poor quality of Fantastic Four, but the movie apparently didn’t even have an ending when shooting concluded. Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker scrambled to come up with something, but the former’s busy schedule and the fact that much of the cast was unavailable led to“a lot of material was shot with doubles and the production moved to Los Angeles to film scenes with Teller against a green screen. ‘It was chaos,’ says a crew member, adding that Trank was still in attendance ‘but was neutralized by a committee.’”

Josh himself seems to be living in a delusional world about everything.  Right before the release of the film he sent out an email to the cast and crew saying that the film would be better than “99 percent of the comic-book movies ever made” Celebrity attorney Martin Singer has been acquired for Trank, so it looks like he is going to double down on problematic bullshit.

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