When you’re a producer, director, actor, or anyone directly responsible for creating a film, it’s understandable that you’ll defend your work to the bitter end, even if the product isn’t great. This happens almost every month or so, as a new stinker gets prepared to be released in theaters and the cast and crew do the publicity rounds assuring moviegoers that everything is great, and this new widget is better than the faulty one last time. But when you have something as terrible as the 2015 “Fantastic Four” reboot, sometimes you just have to admit defeat.
And now, four years after the Josh Trank-directed film (that he already publicly disavowed numerous times since its release), two producers from “Fantastic Four” are ready to come clean and tell the world that mistakes were made.
Speaking to YahooUK, Hutch Parker and Simon Kinberg, two of the big name producers involved with most Fox/Marvel productions, spoke about “Fantastic Four,” while promoting their latest superhero film, “Dark Phoenix.” (No, the irony of admitting one film is bad, while doing publicity for another not-great film isn’t lost on us.)
“Is there anything I would have done differently [on ‘Fantastic Four’]?” Parker admitted. “Yeah, there are. There are lots of things I would have done differently.”
Parker doesn’t reveal any specifics about the troubled production, which reportedly saw director Trank sidelined during massive reshoots, where the entire third act was redone, completely altering the film in the process. Don’t cry for Trank, however, as it’s also been reported that the young director was going through some…err, issues during production, which not only led to this film going off the rails, but eventually to him being let go from the proposed “Boba Fett” film for Lucasfilm.
“I think that the thing that [‘Fantastic Four’] suffered from was… it was a sort of disconnect between the approach to the material and the actual material itself,” Kinberg said. “I think the ‘Fantastic Four’ is a fun, playful, more comedic, lighter comic. And I think the approach was a darker, more serious, somber movie. And while that seemed very radical, and revolutionary, I think those two things just didn’t necessarily mesh.”
Kinberg is only partially right with his evaluation. Yes, the ‘FF’ comics are noticeably lighter in tone than the 2015 film, but the “somber” tone isn’t the reason the film didn’t succeed. Many comic book and film fans would agree that if Fox stuck to that tone and finished the body-horror film that Trank set out to make, it would have been drastically different than the source material, sure, but it would have perhaps been great. Instead, the reshoots turned the original vision, and its dark tone, into something else…a mixture of dark and light that definitely didn’t “mesh.”
Parker concluded, “What I’d like to hope – as somebody who survived some really challenging productions, both when I was at the studio, and now as a producer – is that you learn each time and you become wiser about the ways in which you can ensure a great experience.”
Sadly, or not so sadly (depending on how you view the Disney/Fox merger), Parker and Kinberg’s days of shepherding the studios’ Marvel characters seem to be coming to an end with “Dark Phoenix.” So, it appears the producers will have to apply those lessons learned without the benefit of Marvel characters.
“Dark Phoenix” is in theaters now.