Fantastic Four 2015's Director Cut Doesn’t Fully Exist
Despite what some might believe, a director's cut of the 2015 Fantastic Four doesn't fully exist. Following two Fantastic Four films in the early 2000s that earned middling responses, Fox decided to reboot the property and put director Josh Trank at the helm. At the time, Trank had only directed one other film: Chronicle, a sci-fi thriller that performed surprisingly well and put Trank on the top of most studios' wish lists. However, as Trank's Fantastic Four got underway, reports of behind the scenes issues began to surface. When the film was finally released in theaters, it was hit with scathing reviews and a poor box office performance that only reached $167.8 million worldwide.
Right before Fantastic Four was released, Trank let loose a now-infamous tweet saying, "A year ago I had a fantastic version of this... You’ll probably never see it." Like any other superhero blockbuster, Fantastic Four underwent reshoots that ended up removing much of Trank's original vision. His tweet led many to believe there might have been a director's cut of the film, one that would prove to be far better than the theatrical release. However, that doesn't seem to be the case now.
In a recent interview with Polygon, wherein Trank spoke about his experience working on Fantastic Four, it was mentioned that Trank struck a deal with Fox to cut his own version of the film while the studio cut its own, and both versions would be screened for test audiences. However, this never came to pass, though Trank did continue to edit his own cut. As to where that cut went, it's less clear. However, Polygon did say, after discussing Trank's disastrous pre-release tweet, Trank "He went out swinging to defend a 'fantastic version of Fantastic Four' — a version of the movie that no one, including Trank, can really say existed."
This falls in line with a review of Fantastic Four Trank wrote himself last fall, where he said, "Did I make that movie [the cast] deserved to be in? To be honest? I can’t tell." What it sounds like is Trank did in fact edit his own cut of Fantastic Four, but even that cut wasn't the film he had set out to make. As Trank said himself in the online review, this isn't the case of Zack Snyder's Justice League, where a director actually did film the movie he wanted to, but was unable to release it because of studio influence and a personal tragedy. The campaign for the Snyder Cut lives on, but Trank isn't encouraging anyone to fight for the release of the Trank Cut.
Fans calling for various directors' cuts isn't new, and in fact only seems to be increasing in frequency as more reports of studio influence emerge. For example, there was a brief call for a release of the J.J. Abrams Cut of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker last winter before fans realized no such thing existed. While the Snyder Cut almost certainly exists, not every blockbuster movie that fails to meet fans' expectations has an alternate version waiting in the wings. The theatrical version of Trank's Fantastic Four is the only one that exists, and considering how it turned out, that might be for the best.
Source: Polygon