Fox’s Marvel efforts haven’t always been terrific. The studio’s two Deadpool movies were pretty well received, but the X-Men franchise was wildly inconsistent following Bryan Singer’s first two films.
X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were arguably low points, as were X-Men: Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, while Josh Boone’s The New Mutants is still idling on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust. Days Of Future Past and Logan still stand out amongst Fox’s most recent Marvel offerings before it was acquired by Disney – and who knows what Kevin Feige et al have planned for those properties in the future?
A man that witnessed first hand the problems Fox had “getting in its own way” with its Marvel instalments was Chronicle director Josh Trank, who was brought in to reboot the Fantastic Four films. Released to a poor box office and grim reviews in 2015, there were reports of huge reshoots and trouble behind the scenes of Fantasic Four that included clashes between Fox and Trank, whose ‘body horror’ vision for the film didn’t seem to fly well with X-Men boss Simon Kinberg, and Trank was said to have very little involvement in Fantastic Four‘s messy third act.
This is what Trank had to say about his own film, four years on from Fantastic Four‘s release:
Trank’s next film, Fonzo, stars Tom Hardy as notorious gangster Al Capone, and focuses on his battle with syphilis in the years following his release from prison. The movie was recently pushed back to 2020.
