It’s been 10 years since Fantastic Four flopped, but its box-office failure still smarts for star Miles Teller.
The Top Gun: Maverick actor played the lead role of Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic in the Marvel/20th Century Fox project.
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Speaking to Andy Cohen on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy, Teller had high praise for the film’s cast and crew … except one person.
“I think it’s unfortunate because so many people work so hard on that movie, and, honestly, maybe there was one really important person who kind of f–ked it all up,” he said. “But especially as a young actor at that time, it was like: ‘If you want to be taken seriously as a leading man, you got to get on this superhero train.’ And that was our chance. And the casting, I thought, was spectacular. I love all those actors.” (The film’s co-stars included Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Kate Mara and Tim Blake Nelson).
Continued Teller: “But when I first saw the movie, I remember talking to one of the studio heads and I was like, ‘I think we’re in trouble.’”
Teller didn’t specify who he was talking about. But the film sparked a behind-the-scenes blame game, which Hollywood Reporter covered at the time. Before the movie opened, director Josh Trank sent an email to some members of the cast and crew to say he was proud of the film, which, he wrote, was “better than 99 percent of the comic-book movies ever made.” One unnamed cast member replied to the email and wrote: “I don’t think so.”
According to sources associated with the film, the director “did not produce material that would have opened the way to a salvageable film.” And some claimed Trank resisted help. “He holed up in a tent and cut himself off from everybody,” said one. Between setups, a source said, “[Trank] would go to his trailer and he wouldn’t interact with anybody.”
Trank also tweeted that he had made “a fantastic version” of the film that audiences would “probably never see,” then quickly deleted the message.
Trank has since said about the film to Variety: “As far as my own level of responsibility in the film turning out to be a disaster and not working, I was absolutely responsible. But so was everybody else. When I was in the middle of the situation, it was very clear that everybody was doing the wrong thing … You’ve got all of these professional adults who worked on a lot of movies and all these well-established industry insiders who have been making these types of movies for a long time, and here’s this young, relatively inexperienced filmmaker being described as in over his head. They said I wasn’t communicating with people and didn’t want to play by the rules … What I remembered was I was being overly communicative. The problem was I was communicating ideas that didn’t mesh well with everybody else’s. That’s not their fault and it’s not my fault. It was the wrong combination of people to get together and make something creative.”
Marvel, of course, recently attempted a new version of Fantastic Four with this summer’s moderately successful First Steps, with Pedro Pascal stepping into the role of Mr. Fantastic.
While Teller stars in the upcoming rom-com fantasy Eternity, where the recently deceased get one week to decide where they want to spend the rest of their non-lives.
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