Directors vs. Studios: Josh Tranks' 'Fantastic Four' Comments the Latest in Eternal Battle for Creative Control
Studios in Hollywood take a great deal of heat. Critics often look at them as money making machines that have the product's financial potential in mind over the creative or artistic merit that can be derived from the situation.
At the same time, the studios bring the money to the table, enabling filmmakers to make movies that would otherwise be out of their reach.
That said, the outspokenness with filmmakers against studios has increased over the years with Josh Trank being the latest to blame 20th Century Fox for the critical failure of his "Fantastic Four" reboot.
"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," wrote the director on a tweet that has since been deleted according to Variety.
Whatever the situation might have been for Trank, the reality is that he works for Fox. Despite being the man hired to direct the reboot of the comic book film, it is not completely his. Trank has also stepped away from directing a "Star Wars" spin-off, citing that he needed to take a different path in his career in the meantime.
Studio intervention has been highly profiled in recent years, none greater than the disputes between Sam Raimi and Sony surrounding the "Spider-Man" films. The first two movies were major box office hits, but the third film was a critical disaster and a step down at the box office. The well-known story goes that Raimi had wanted to keep Sandman and Harry as the main villains but the studio executives were pulling for the appearance of a more popular villain -- Venom.
"They really gave me a tremendous amount of control on the first two films, actually. But then there were different opinions on the third film and I didn't really have creative control, so to speak," he stated during an interview in 2009. He has since changed his tune, admitting that the film was his fault.
He was slated to return to the fourth installment, but creative differences with the studio ultimately led to his retirement from the franchise and a poorly received reboot. What's more, the second "Amazing Spider-Man" film showed similar problems as the third film under Raimi's direction, mainly too many villains and storylines.
A year ago Quentin Tarantino chimed in on the studio system with a rather aggressive choice of words. When asked about the possibility of working on "Star Wars Episode VII," the auteur adamantly rejected the notion.
"I could so care less," he stated in an interview. "No, sorry. Especially if Disney's going to do it. I'm not interested in the Simon West version of Star Wars."
One could estimate that a great deal of the current issue, one certainly related to Trank and Tarantino's comment, is that studios are looking at creating cinematic universes in which films interact with other films. Marvel's universe provides one example in which the world building is already planned out, thus limiting what a director could bring to the story.
Prominent filmmakers such as Kenneth Branagh have left major franchise pictures due to creative differences. Joss Whedon, who directed the two successful "Avengers" movies, noted that he struggled to make the second one because of major creative differences with the studio.
"The dreams were not an executive favorite either - the dreams, the farmhouse, these were things I fought to keep," Whedon said according to Yahoo. "With the cave, it really turned into: they pointed a gun at the farm's head and said, 'Give us the cave, or we'll take out the farm,' -- in a civilized way. I respect these guys, they're artists, but that's when it got really, really unpleasant."
He later revealed that the studio changed its mind on the cave sequence it had staunchly fought for and had also taken out his desire to put Captain Marvel and Spider-Man in the new film.
Studio battles are nothing new and have happened for decades. However, the world-building by studios in the current cinematic landscape could be deterring major filmmakers from taking on those projects for fear of creative control.