Here’s the story: young, promising film director scuffles
around for a few years, finally gets his shot and makes a low-budget,
critically acclaimed movie. As a reward, the powers that be hand him the
keys to a mega-budget franchise tent pole movie that will make him millions of
dollars and set him for life. The film is released and . . . you fill in
the rest.
If the young director is named Colin Trevorrow (previous
film Safety Not Guaranteed), the result is Jurassic World, one of the
three biggest grossing films of all-time, critical praise, commercial success,
and a future doing pretty much whatever he wants. If the name of the
director is Josh Trank (previous film Chronicle), the result is Fantastic Four,
humiliation, a 9% Rotten Tomato score, self-immolation with a pathetic "My vision would have been great!" tweet, and
losing a chance to direct a film in the Star Wars franchise.
The entertainment business is about risk and reward.
This has always frustrated corporate studio heads who think that producing
reliable movies should be as simple as producing reliable cars. Marvel
had a good run with 12 consecutive #1 openings, but that streak had to end
sometime, and it did with Fantastic Four’s opening at #2 (I will refrain from
making a number 2 joke). The rebooted Fantastic Four opened at $26
million, which sounds like a lot until you realize that Fantastic Four: Rise of
the Silver Surfer, which was a bad sequel to a bad origin movie, opened at $58
million.
Would it reduce the amount of risk if directors were
required to have a little more experience before being given the keys of a
potential franchise? I saw Safety Not Guaranteed and liked it, but I
wouldn’t have thought the director possible of managing an epic like Jurassic
World; the artistic vision may be there, but can he work with union-represented
crews, high-tech special effect houses, ego driven stars who care more about
their lighting than their lines, and studio execs delivering notes like they
were the word of God?
As summer releases racked up record grosses (three of the
top six grossing films of all time were released in 2015), I have been
waiting for the train wreck (which, ironically, turned out NOT to be
Trainwreck). Terminator: Genysis was a disappointment, but not a
disaster. I suspected that eventually audience fatigue with special
effects and explosions would culminate in a big budget film epically failing at
the box office; Fantastic Four is that train wreck.
Suspicions around Fantastic Four have been buzzing around
the internet for months. I think everything you need to know can be
gleaned from Miles Teller’s blank expression on the Fantastic Four poster (he
looks like someone desperately trying not to reveal that it was he who just
farted); he can’t even work up enthusiasm for the POSTER, so what is his
performance going to be like? It didn’t help that the previous two Fantastic
Four films (I won’t count the Roger Corman produced effort that was not made for release)
weren’t very good and were still fresh in people’s memories despite Fox’s
attempt to erase them from history.
Despite all the blame being spread between the director, the
cast, and probably the craft services people, some blame is being aimed at the
studio for greenlighting a Fantastic Four reboot so soon after the initial two
films went off into the sunset. The recent (less-than-successful) reboot
of Spiderman so soon after the Tobey Maguire series has some thinking that
franchises need to lie fallow before getting re-invented for a new
generation. Of course that theory ignores the fact that The Amazing Spiderman
and the rebooted Fantastic Four simply weren’t very good movies.
I am somewhat buoyed by the announcement that the
re-rebooted Spiderman will NOT feature an origin story; I refused to sit
through another exposition of how radioactive spiders can cause teenaged boys
to stick to walls and sense when danger is coming. I also approve
of casting Marisa Tomei as Aunt May; if she is a teenager’s
aunt, shouldn’t she be in her 40’s or early 50’s and not her 60’s of
70’s? It’s about time we had an Aunt May who was also a MILF.
One wonders if the fate of Fantastic Four will give Marvel
pause about its multi-year, multi-universe plan of launching franchise films in
the future. As the old saying goes, “Man plans and God laughs.” All
it would take is one mis-step and the first Marvel film that does “less well
than expected” could topple the rows of dominoes that have been set up (I
suppose the gross for Age of Ultron, $1.4 billion, could be considered
disappointing in that it was expected to surpass the original The Avengers).
Who knows how long the superhero
fad will last in movies; maybe next year a bunch or Anime features will crack
$1 billion in worldwide grosses. In the meantime Marvel will continue to
churn out its product, presumably without any additional help from Josh Trank.
I just want to add a quick addendum: I am boycotting the film
version of The Man From UNCLE. A year or
so ago I watched the first three seasons of the TV series, and the thing I was
most impressed with was the fact that at the height of the Cold War they
created a Russian character who was not a stereotypical Commie-loving,
duplicitous Russian (see Checkov on Star Trek). So in the movie they make Illya Kuryakin a KGB spy.
I haven’t been this upset about a change in adapting a TV show to a
movie since [Spoiler alert!] the first Mission Impossible film made Jim Phelps
the bad guy. If you’r going to do the
show, just do the show.
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