Josh Trank: How cinema’s brightest wunderkind was sent to director’s jail in record time
Any first-time filmmaker who bursts onto the scene is going to be courted by the major studios sooner rather than later, a process that gets sped up exponentially when they do it with a hugely profitable and starkly different spin on the biggest and most bankable genre in Hollywood.
2012’s Chronicle captured the imagination of audiences by taking the tropes and trappings of the superhero origin tale and applying them to a grounded, realistic, coming-of-age high school story. It was a breath of fresh air when the majority of comic book-derived blockbusters had become increasingly homogenised to the point of banality, but the stars fared substantially better than the creatives.
Dane DeHaan and Michael B. Jordan especially benefitted immensely from Chronicle, but the same cannot be said of director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis. When the film hit cinemas in February 2012, they were only 27 and 26 years old respectively, with many singling them out as genre cinema’s hottest new wunderkinds on the block.
Whereas Landis would ultimately see his career go up in smoke following a string of troubling allegations, Trank was swiftly handed the reins on two of the biggest properties in the business. When Chronicle debuted at number one at the box office in the United States, Trank became the youngest-ever director to accomplish that feat. The record had stood for almost 40 years, when it was set by some guy called Steven Spielberg and some movie called Jaws, to give an indication of the company he was in.
Just like that, he was being inundated with offers, but setting his sights high, Trank signed on for Marvel’s Fantastic Four reboot just five months after the release of his debut feature, while in June 2014, he was named by Lucasfilm as the director of a standalone Star Wars spinoff focusing on iconic bounty hunter Boba Fett.
However, Trank’s second feature ended up sending him straight to director’s jail, torpedoing both his potential and reputation in one fell swoop. He regularly butted heads with 20th Century Fox over virtually every aspect of the production, with the studio making sweeping changes to the movie that flew in the face of the filmmaker’s vision, while there were additional reports of Trank behaving erratically on set, trashing the rented home he was living in at the time, and generally making life difficult for the behind the scenes power players.
24 hours before Fantastic Four was released, he took to social media and told the world there was a great version of the film that existed, but it wasn’t the one about to be released. Technically he was correct after it turned out to be one of the worst Marvel adaptations in history, before he departed his Star Wars project in the months following the dismal reception to his Chronicle follow-up.
The one and only credit on his directorial filmography since then is Tom Hardy’s crime biopic Capone, and while the leading man gives a suitably committed and idiosyncratic performance, the movie as a whole really isn’t up to much. It was a rapid fall from grace, and just three years after snatching a record from Spielberg and being sought out for both Star Wars and Marvel, Trank has been left on the outside of the mainstream looking in ever since.
