Miles Teller Knew ‘Fantastic Four’ Was In Trouble, Blames An Unnamed Individual Who “F’ed It All Up”
2015’s Fantastic Four, better known under the stylized title of “Fant4stic,” goes down as one of the biggest cinematic disasters for any comic book franchise. Worse, a lot of people knew it was going to be bad, including its lead actor. Miles Teller, who played a younger, precocious Reed Richards that led his friends on a fateful mission into The Negative Zone.
Teller knew the film was as dead on arrival as that mission was in the movie. “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,'” the actor said in an interview with Andy Cohen, host of Radio Andy on SiriusXM.
That was unfortunate as Teller thought the production brought together a great cast, including Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Kate Mara, Tim Blake Nelson, and Toby Kebbell. Explained Teller “…especially as a young actor, at that time, it’s like, ‘All right, if you wanna be taken seriously as a leading man, you gotta get on this superhero train.’ And that was our chance, and the casting, I thought, was spectacular. I love all those actors.”
When it came to what went wrong, the buck stops with one person, though Teller didn’t identify them by name. “I think it’s unfortunate for that, because so many people worked so hard on that movie. And honestly, maybe there was one really important person who kind of f–ed it all up. Yeah,” he said.
The most important person on the set is typically the director, which means we endeavor to guess that the one Teller is cryptically referring to is Josh Trank. Most make the same guess since Trank was a headache for 20th Century Fox, who put all their chips behind the wunderkind based solely on the success of his found-footage sci-fi thriller Chronicle.
It was reported in the years since the movie flopped that Trank and Teller had an argument that almost led to a fight on set. Kate Mara later revealed her experience on the film was horrible, an account backed up by reports saying Trank was “cold to cruel” in his interactions with her because he didn’t want to cast her, but was forced into it.
Fox reshot the ending and much of the film into what we got, and Trank reacted by tweeting his displeasure. Disowning the theatrical release, Trank bragged that his version was “fantastic.” Wrote the director (via ComicBookMovie), “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.”
NEXT: ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ Review – As Easy As Taking A Baby From Galactus
