Fantastic Four Director Pitched Venom Movie To Sony Before Fox Mess
Director Josh Trank says he pitched an R-rated Venom movie to Sony. Once upon a time, Trank was regarded as one of the more promising up and coming filmmakers in Hollywood. After helming a handful of episodes on the TV series The Kill Point in the late 2000s, Trank made his feature debut with 2012's Chronicle, a found-footage thriller about a trio of teenagers who gain superpowers only for one of them to gradually succumb to their darker impulses. It was a hit with critics and grossed more than ten times its $12 million budget at the box office, putting Trank firmly on the fast-track to become a bigger name.
Instead, Trank went on to direct 2015's Fantastic Four reboot, a movie which endured an infamously troubled production and opened to generally bad reviews on its way to bombing financially. Five years later, Trank is attempting a comeback with Capone, a direct to PVOD release starring Tom hardy as the real-life gangster Al Capone in his twilight years (when he was suffering from dementia). As it turns out, however, he had wanted to make a completely different Marvel comic book movie before he signed on for F4.
In an extensive interview with Polygon to promote Capone and discuss his career so far, Trank revealed he'd approach Sony about doing a hard-R Venom movie and worked up a treatment for the film with writer-director Rob Siegel (whom Trank has collaborated with on 2009's Big Fan). However, Matt Tolmach (who's been producing the Spider-Man movies since 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man) "hated" the idea, according to Trank.
I didn’t like how Matt Tolmach was coming at me in that situation, because it felt very kind of authoritative. Well, if you don’t like what I’m doing, and you’re telling me that I have to do something along the lines of what you want, and you’re going to tell it to me in this way - sorry, but I have other things I can be doing.
Sony would eventually go on to make a Venom film in 2018, with (as chance would have it) Hardy starring as Eddie Brock. The movie was far from a critical darling, yet it grossed $856 million at the box office and has a sequel, titled Venom: Let There Be Carnage, scheduled to arrive in the summer of 2021. Meanwhile, Trank would go on to disown the theatrical cut of Fantastic Four right before its release and became notorious for trashing the film on Twitter in the years that followed. He's also continued to shed more light on just how messy things got behind the scenes on the project. Case in point: in his interview with Polygon, Trank claimed Fox decided it simply wouldn't film Fantastic Four's endings during production and save it for reshoots instead.
Development woes aside, Trank's idea of re-imagining the Fantastic Four as a body horror story for his reboot was polarizing from the get-go. Even if he'd gotten to realize his original creative vision, there's no guarantee general audiences would've liked it. He surely would've had an easier time selling fans on a similar plan for the Venom movie by comparison, seeing as body horror has always been one of the titular character's core elements. Problem is, Trank would've pitched this concept to Sony long before studios became more open to the notion of R-rated superhero blockbusters (following the success of Deadpool and Logan). Still, it seems there's another timeline out there where Trank made a Venom movie. Who knows, maybe it too would've featured a scene where Hardy jumps into a lobster tank.
Source: Polygon