Not-So FANTASTIC FOUR Fizzles Out on Opening Weekend

By Jasper C-H on Sunday, August 9th, 2015

Less than a week ago, Fantastic Four was projected to make around $50m+ on its opening weekend and had some decent early buzz. That’s a pretty good number for the movie and would have probably made Fox happy.

In the time since, its landed a 9% score on Rotten Tomatoes, bad buzz from pretty much everybody and has now chalked up $26.2m this weekend – over $20m less than what was predicted just days ago. In all my (well, four) years of online writing and following the movie circuit I’ve never seen a big movie like this fall so hard so fast.

To put that into perspective: the first two entries pulled in $56.1m and $58.1m which is roughly what this movie should have made. Yeah, $26m is obviously a lot to us, but for a $120m superhero franchise it’s fucking awful. What’s worse is that it’s not even #1 – that goes to Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation ($29m) which is in its second weekend.

The steep drop is for a number of reasons. The movie never really held footing with the fans because of controversy surrounding the creative decisions and director Josh Trank, but I think people still wanted to give it a shot (even if a lot wanted it to bomb so the rights would revert). Then 40 pages of reshoots happened and as the release date got closer and closer, people began to hear that it was a mess. Now that it’s been released, the truth is out. It’s incredibly obvious that Fantastic Four is the victim of studio meddling, which Trank confirmed the other night on Twitter.

You know it’s bad when even the director distances himself.

Trank’s blaming Fox and Fox is blaming Trank as sources told Entertainment Weekly that his misconduct on set was to blame. However, they elaborate further and say that it was most definitely problems on both sides that caused problems. If you want to read the full report then head over to the link, but needless to say, this film was probably doomed from the start.

I’ve always been a supporter of Trank which has been growing more difficult in recent days with all these allegations flying against him, but it looks like he might actually have been right – this could be largely Fox’s mess. Regardless, I feel bad for him. This could have been a really good movie but basically everything went wrong. Hopefully he turns out OK in the long run.

Check out UTF’s review of Fantastic Four here, and listen to CUT TO: Podcast laying into it and trying to figure out what went wrong here!