Just two years after “Rise of the Silver Surfer,” and one year after the Marvel Cinematic Universe got off to a rousing start with “Iron Man,” reports surfaced in 2009 that Fox was readying a “Fantastic Four” reboot. That same year Fox floundered with the release of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” so they were trying to sort out the future of their Marvel properties at a time when superheroes were booming on the big screen.

The project languished in development for several years. Then in 2012, coming off the success of the found footage flick “Chronicle,” Josh Trank was brought on board to direct a reimagining of “Fantastic Four.” He was a director with some big ideas who wanted to do something very different with the characters who were first brought to life in the ’60s by Marvel Comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Trank would go younger with the casting, bringing in Miles Teller (“Whiplash”) as Reed Richards, Kate Mara (“House of Cards”) as Sue Storm, Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm, and Michael B. Jordan (“Fruitvale Station”) as Johnny Storm to lead the cast, with Toby Kebbell (“War Horse”) as Doctor Doom. He was also going to go darker and grittier, citing body horror master David Cronenberg (“The Fly”) as an influence in a pre-release interview:

“I’m a huge David Cronenberg fan, and I always viewed Fantastic Four and the kind of weirdness that happens to these characters and how they’re transformed to really fall in line more with a Cronenberg-ian science fiction tale of something horrible happening to your body and [it] transforming out of control.”

With any blockbuster, things will change during development. The studio has ideas, and those ideas might clash with the filmmaker’s creative vision. Such is the way. “Fantastic Four” was no exception, with lots of ideas changing along the way. But there are the normal aches and pains that come along with a $120 million production. Then there’s this.

“Josh and I probably just saw different movies. I was more of an ‘Avengers’ guy and, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he was more of a ‘Batman Begins,’ like ultra-grounded, dark and gritty guy,” screenwriter Jeremy Slater explained in a 2025 interview. So, there was very much a vision clash with the two core creatives. Then there’s what was going on behind the scenes between Trank and the studio. 

Post-release reports circulated suggesting that Trank was behaving poorly and on set and was even possibly locked out of the editing room. For his part, the director later denied those claims saying, “None of those facts were true — and any of the facts that were true were spun in such a maliciously wrong way.” Though he did add, “It’s been a challenging movie — for all of the right reasons.”

That truly just scratches the surface and, while specifics are disputed to this day, it was clearly a s***-show. It all came to a head when, just before the release when the buzz was souring, Trank tweeted (then deleted) a takedown of his own superhero blockbuster, which read as follows:

“A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”

Even though the tweet was deleted, the press got hold of it and the damage was done. 

Fox leaned into the gritty, dark, different nature of the reboot in the marketing. Gritty reboots were all the rage around that time, with everything from “The Dark Knight” to “Skyfall” succeeding greatly using that template. “Fantastic Four” had big problems though, hitting theaters with disastrous reviews. It currently holds an abysmal 9% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the worst ever for a Marvel movie of any kind. Dark and gritty did it no favors.

“Fantastic Four” arrived on the weekend of August 7, 2015. Pre-release tracking suggested it would open in the $40 or $50 million range. That’s not great for a superhero movie but this movie would tumble far lower than “not great,” debuting to an absolutely lousy $25.6 million. It remains one of the worst openings ever for a Marvel movie, and didn’t even manage the No. 1 spot in the box office charts. “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” ($28.5 million), then in its second weekend, came out on top.

Bad word of mouth soured the punch, with “Fantastic Four” plummeting 68% for a second weekend take of just $8.1 million. As acclaimed hits like “Straight Outta Compton” arrived, it simply fell off a cliff. Trank’s doomed “Fantastic Four” finished its run with $56.1 million domestically to go with $111.8 million internationally for a grand total of $167.9 million worldwide. That didn’t even come close to covering production and marketing costs.

Depending on how one wants to calculate it, it easily ranks as one of the biggest superhero box office bombs ever, right up there with the likes of “Dark Phoenix” ($246 million worldwide/$200 million budget), “Catwoman” ($82 million worldwide/$100 million budget), and 2023’s “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” ($134 million worldwide/$125 million budget).

It’s not quite competing with “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” ($7.1 million worldwide/$100 million budget) for biggest bomb of all time, but this was pretty close to as bad as it gets. That being the case, there was a significant deal of fallout both for Fox and Trank, with the filmmaker taking it in the teeth in the weeks, months, and years that followed.

Trank had been hired to direct a “Star Wars” movie centered on Boba Fett in summer 2014, but he was let go from the project by May 2015. That was a sign of things to come. Multiple reports circulated painting Trank in a negative light and it all but ruined his career. It was bad for Fox, but it was ruinous for Trank, a director who was just getting his feet off the ground. 

In the years since, Trank has only directed one film: 2020’s “Capone,” which starred Tom Hardy. It was met with a muted response. He has a horror movie titled “Send a Scare” in post-production as we speak, but his opportunities have been few and far between over the last decade, to put it lightly.

Fox, amazingly, seemed eager to revisit Reed Richards and the gang. “X-Men” franchise producer Simon Kinberg said they “want to make another Fantastic Four movie” in May 2016, while acknowleding that they “didn’t make a good movie.” In 2017, rumors circulated suggested that a new “kid-friendly” take on “Fantastic Four” was in the works. Just a few months later, though, any plans Fox had would become a moot point.

By November 2017, it was reported that Disney was looking to buy most of Fox’s media assets. Disney, which owned Marvel Studios and was shattering records with the MCU, desperately wanted the rights to the “X-Men” and “Fantastic Four.” While it would be silly to think Disney spent $71 billion just for that, it was certainly a factor. The other big factor was the oncoming streaming wars.

“What could it mean having access to [Fox’s] library, not to monetize it through traditional means, but to do it through [streaming]?” Disney CEO Bob Iger said to CNBC in 2019 after the deal closed. “Bam! I mean, the light bulb went off.”

The Fox era of Marvel was over. What started with “X-Men” in 2000, which helped kick off the superhero movie boom, was over. “Dark Phoenix” was essentially dumped to theaters in 2019 and Disney inherited “The New Mutants,” dropping it during the pandemic in 2020. That was that. Nearly 20 years and $6 billion at the box office later, and it was all over.

It would be wildly unfair to lay everything that happened at the feet of “Fantastic Four,” but it’s hard not to see this as a beginning to an end. As one of the key unraveling points of the whole enterprise. Fox didn’t just give up on superheroes — they sold the whole damn studio just a few years later. 

This article is being published as “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” makes its way to theaters with very solid reviews. Marvel Studios has seemingly worked its magic with the beloved characters who are poised to help the studio get out of a slump brought on by the likes of “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Thunderbolts.” In some ways, that movie’s journey began in 2015 with this trainwreck of a would-be blockbuster.

Trank has tried to have a good attitude about the whole thing, even famously reviewing his own “Fantastic Four” movie on Letterboxd in 2019. But it feels either very telling or radically unfair that he’s hardly been a factor in Hollywood over the last decade. Without first-hand knowledge of what happened, I can’t confidently say which one it is. Either way, it’s f****d up.

What I can say is that a big part of the reason why Fox was so eager to get this movie made is that they had to make a movie every so many years or risk losing the “Fantastic Four” rights. That clock was ticking, so this movie got made. That’s never a good reason to enter into a creative endeavor.

Beyond that, Fox hired Trank and it seemed like he had a pretty specific vision. Did that include a terrible take on Doctor Doom? Was it as bad as what we got? We’ll never know. What we do know, however, is that leaning away from that vision led to unquestionable catastrophe. Setting any alleged bad behavior aside, there’s something to be said about sticking to a vision. I mean, how could it have possibly been any worse?