Who is the youngest filmmaker to direct a number one movie?
Achieving enormous success at a young age can often be a double-edged sword, and that maxim can certainly be applied to the youngest director in history to helm a number one movie at the US box office. After all, following the unprecedented success of his first film, his career went so far off the rails that he’s only brought two more movies to the big screen in over a decade since its release.
In his early 20s, aspiring filmmaker Josh Trank took whatever job he could find if it got him closer to his dream of directing a feature film. He achieved some online infamy with a YouTube video entitled ‘Stabbing at Leia’s 22nd Birthday’, and this led to a gig directing spinoff webisodes for the John Leguizamo-starring Spike TV series The Kill Point. Fascinatingly, he even turned his hand to editing when he put together the indie film Big Fan, which he also co-produced and acted in.
However, Trank’s big break came when he had the idea to combine the found-footage horror genre with superhero storytelling. He envisioned the story of an abused teenage boy who buys a video camera to document the burgeoning superpowers he and his two friends experience after coming into contact with a mysterious glowing crystal-like object in the woods. When he ran the idea past his screenwriter pal Max Landis – yes, the now-disgraced son of An American Werewolf in London’s John Landis – he loved it, and soon the two 26-year-olds were pitching the script around Hollywood.
In January 2011, 20th Century Fox optioned the script with Trank attached to direct, but before this point, the filmmaker had to jump through plenty of hoops for half a year to prove to the studio that he had the chops to direct a $15million picture at an even younger age than Steven Spielberg was when he made Jaws.
“I had a lot to do to prove myself during the six-month development period before we got the green light,” Trank admitted to Complex magazine.
“I knew that the studio would be sceptical of me as a 26-year-old,” he continued, “So I wrote a very detailed director’s statement, going over all of the ways in which I would film the movie, how I saw the movie, what it was, and how the production would work.”
For Trank, this was simply about owning the obvious fact he was young and inexperienced, while also doing his best to be honest about what he hoped to accomplish.
How well did the movie do?
Ultimately, Chronicle wound up being an even bigger smash hit than anyone at the studio, or Trank himself, could have predicted. It opened at number one in its first weekend with a box office haul of $22m, eventually legging out to a hugely impressive $126.6m worldwide. This made Trank the youngest director to open a movie at the top of the chart, beating Spielberg, who was 28 when he did the same with Jaws, and James Cameron, who was 30 when The Terminator hit top spot.
Unfortunately for Trank, his career post-Chronicle has seen him move so far away from any Spielberg or Cameron comparisons that they now seem woefully premature. The young director followed up his sleeper hit with 2015’s Fantastic Four, a reboot of Marvel’s first family. This project was so cursed from all sides that he effectively disowned it upon release, and stories were rife about Trank’s erratic behaviour on the movie being an enormous problem for Fox executives. Indeed, it supposedly led to his removal from directing duties on a Star Wars spinoff centred on Boba Fett.
Following the debacle of Fantastic Four, Trank retreated somewhat from the public eye, reemerging in 2020 with Capone, a bizarre biopic of the infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone. That strange film, which starred a scatological Tom Hardy, debuted on video-on-demand thanks to the pandemic and received damning reviews almost across the board. Still, at least they were marginally better than Fantastic Four’s vitriolic panning. The once-promising young director will be hoping he can get back on track with his upcoming low-budget horror movie, Send a Scare.
