What happened after Fantastic Four broke Josh Trank

https://www.polygon.com/2020/5/5/21246679/josh-trank-capone-interview-fantastic-four-chronicle

Trank was the obvious candidate to reinvigorate Fantastic Four for 20th Century Fox. In 2010, the studio plucked the then-26-year-old filmmaker from obscurity to direct the microbudgeted Chronicle. The story of three high schoolers who gain, and are torn apart, by superhuman power gave Trank the chance to rewire the “found footage” style with untethered psychic velocity. Critical praise, combined with a new title — the youngest person ever to open a movie at No. 1 at the box office — imbued the filmmaker with the aura of an action auteur. When Chronicle finished its theatrical run with a $123 million worldwide gross, studios scrambled to tap Trank’s energy. Sony attached him to the Spider-Man-adjacent Venom; Warner Bros. wanted him for the spy thriller Red Star; he worked to adapt the beloved video game Shadow of the Colossus; he got a Star Wars movie. At the top of his world, Trank quit drinking, bought a car, and met the love of his life, whom he married six months later.

The race to book Trank ended in late 2012 with an offer from Fox to direct Fantastic Four. In the mid-2000s, a pair of lighthearted Fantastic Four films led by Jessica Alba and Chris Evans failed to break through in a zeitgeist captured by Christopher Nolan’s gritty reinvention of Batman. Fox hoped that a modern sensibility could take the property in a new direction, despite veterans like I Am Legend writer Akiva Goldsman and the team behind 2011’s Thor being unable to make it work. Trank voiced his interest, and though Fox executives offered him the chance to pursue something original, the Marvel movie “felt like the most rebellious thing to do,” the director said. His take on the material made him confident. A company buying into his hype made him bullheaded. Fox didn’t want to make another Fantastic Four movie — it wanted to make Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four movie.

The movie was a multitiered bomb. On top of critical pans and a worldwide gross of $167 million, just a third of what the first Fantastic Four made 10 years earlier, the lead-up and fallout of the film saw Trank caught in behind-the-scenes drama. Insiders told The Hollywood Reporter at the time that the director had been erratic, reclusive, and absent-minded enough to allow his three dogs to do $100,000 worth of damage to the Louisiana home rented for the shoot. The first time I spoke to Trank, eight months after the release of Fantastic Four, he pushed back on the details in the report. His disposition was harder to defend. “There have been a lot of times when I’ve been told, ‘This is how you should handle this,’ and I handle it in a different way and it turns out in my favor,” he said. “And then there have also been times when I’ve been wrong, and it has only resulted in complete disaster.”

Trank’s tweet, a last-ditch effort to shape history in his favor, made him a bigger target. Headlines from The Daily Beast to Defamer and every geek blog under the sun aggregated his words as more gossip thickened the plot. The public autopsy sent the director into hiding. In the silence, he spiraled. Fury smoldered into numbness. His relationship was dissolving. Days liquefied into weeks, then months. For some reason, he looked at what people on Twitter had to say. “I felt dead inside,” he said.