If you’ve been keeping up-to-date with your film news these past few days, you may have noticed a rather peculiar Kickstarter campaign calling on the Powers That Be to digitally alter The Departed‘s finale, in which a rat scurries across a windowsill after half of the ensemble cast are loaded up with bullets.
It’s admittedly a heavy-handed metaphor, but not enough to warrant an entire online campaign demanding that The Departed, a modern Scorsese classic, be altered, even if its blatantly obvious symbolism threatens to beat the audience over the head.
Nevertheless, one man who partook in the online discourse was Josh Trank, former director of the ill-fated Fantastic Four reboot. Ever since his superhero movie flopped (and flopped hard), Trank has been pretty forthcoming about studio meddling and the errors of his ways – so much so, in fact, that he admitted he’d “gladly” erase all memory of his doomed franchise-starter, given the opportunity.
This now-deleted tweet was first spotted by Screen Rant and can be seen below:
This is by no means the first time that Trank has publicly disowned his Fantastic Four movie, so his scorn shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Still, the circumstances surrounding his take on Marvel’s First Family effectively killed any hope of a potential film franchise being built around Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, Kate Mara and Michael B. Jordan, who, thank the heavens, would later go on to light up Black Panther as the fearsome Killmonger.
Whether it was the rumored production woes or Fantastic Four‘s dismal performance at the box office, Josh Trank’s much-hyped reboot was quickly swept under the rug, leaving just one question: when will Marvel Studios engineer their own in-house version of the First Family? Time will tell.
