A crewmember acknowledges that Trank bears much of the fault for the film's problems but also says the Fox studio should not escape blame. The movie was "ill-conceived, made for the wrong reasons and there was no vision behind the property," this person says. "Say what you will about Marvel but they have a vision."
As Fox hurried to put the project into production before rights to the material reverted to Marvel, the studio was scrambling with multiple rewrites and delays in starting the film. 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." Fox declined to comment.
Another source says the notion of firing Trank came up even before the cameras started to roll. But Fox put its faith in him because he had directed the studio's 2012 found-footage hero movie Chronicle, which grossed $127 million worldwide on a $12 million budget. Based on that, insiders say Fox executives thought they had found an "in-house director," a young talent who could become another J.J. Abrams. And the studio was trying to shake off its reputation for micromanaging filmmakers. So executives were reluctant to interfere on Fantastic Four despite warnings of trouble.
When the seriousness of the problems could no longer be ignored, says a key source on the project, it was too late to fire the director. "How do you ask someone to take over half of a movie shot by someone else?" he says. "You either hire somebody desperate for work or you [start over], write off pretty much the whole budget and lose the cast."
As filming wound toward an unhappy close, the studio and producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker engaged in a last-minute scramble to come up with an ending. With some of the cast not fully available at that point and Kinberg juggling X-Men: Apocalypse and Star Wars, 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 crewmember, adding that Trank was still in attendance "but was neutralized by a committee." Another source says the studio pulled together "a dream team," including writer and World War Z veteran Drew Goddard, to rescue the movie. Whether the final version of the film is better or worse than what Trank put together is a matter of opinion, of course, but the consensus, clearly, is that neither was good.
One central player on the film says the process of making big films often is messy, but in many cases the studio can fight its way out of difficulties. A Fantastic Four crewmember concurs but says that doesn't relieve the studio of its responsibility for what went wrong with this film. "To me, it is a classic indictment of the entire system," he says. "Give Josh Trank a $20 million movie. Groom him. But they don't make those movies anymore. … Nobody should escape scrutiny on this one. Everyone should take a good look in the mirror, myself included. Even I probably did the movie for the wrong reasons."