Josh Trank: The director who wanted to donate money to delete his movie from history

Not many actors or filmmakers have managed to go through their entire careers without at least a couple of movies they regret in one form or another. That said, a director suggesting they’d happily donate to a campaign that wanted to erase an entire film from existence is a step beyond disowning their work.

Of course, it was a fanciful suggestion when a studio will never bend to the whims of a vocal minority when they’ve invested an exorbitant amount of money into a production, regardless of how bad it is or how thunderously it bombs. On this occasion, the flick was definitely a critical and commercial disaster on a massive scale, but it’s still out there in the world for anyone brave enough to give it a shot.

Things were looking so promising for Josh Trank after the wunderkind burst onto the scene with his debut feature Chronicle. Taking a found-footage approach that differentiated it from the deluge of cinematic superhero stories, the lo-fi origin story recouped its budget more than eight times over in ticket sales and set an impressive box office record.

Trank was only 27 years old when Chronicle hit the big screen, and when it debuted at number one in the United States, it made him the youngest director to ever achieve that feat. It was a benchmark that had stood for almost 40 years, knocking some guy called Steven Spielberg and some movie called Jaws from the perch they’d occupied for so long.

However, many rising auteurs have failed to successfully make the jump from smaller productions into the blockbuster machine, and Trank became one of them. Snapped up by 20th Century Fox and handed the reins on rebooting Marvel’s Fantastic Four, the end result was one of the worst-reviewed comic book adaptations of the 21st-century boom.

Reports of difficult behaviour and an antagonistic atmosphere emerged from the set, and less than 24 hours before its release, the filmmaker took to social media to let everyone know the version set to bow in multiplexes worldwide wasn’t reflective of the movie he wanted to make when he first signed on.

Fantastic Four netted Razzie wins for ‘Worst Picture’ and ‘Worst Director’, and many people – including Trank – would prefer if it had never existed at all. As it happened, an enterprising entrepreneur reached out to the director on social media and asked if he’d be interested in contributing to a GoFundMe page designed specifically to erase the film from the history books.

This was in early 2019, almost four years after the Fantastic Four had been sent out into the theatrical wilderness to die a slow and painful death, but Trank’s one-word reply of “Gladly” said it all. Tongue in cheek or not, it spoke volumes either way.

He did return to filmmaking with Tom Hardy’s Capone, but his fateful dalliance with Marvel did massive damage to what was once being hailed as one of the most promising futures in Hollywood.

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