10 Directors Who Sabotaged Their Own Movies

2. Josh Trank - Fantastic Four

It's fair to say that the various stories of the troubled production of 2015's Fantastic Four reboot are far more interesting than the film itself. Director Josh Trank, hot off the success of Chronicle, seemed like an inspired choice with a unique vision.

And though Trank insists that Fox ripped creative control of the project away from him, numerous sources have stated that Trank was a drug-addled, uncommunicative mess during production, even dealing damage to accommodation rented for him during shooting.

According to these reports, he was struggling under the weight of helming such a huge-scale project.

Furthermore, he reportedly had an antagonistic working relationship with star Kate Mara, who was a studio-mandated casting, and very nearly came to blows with co-star Miles Teller as a result.

Even with a massively negative wave of PR against the film in the weeks leading to its release, Trank dealt the killing blow himself by criticising the final cut on Twitter a day before it came out in the U.S., placing a cap on the utter shambles that was the film's production.

Now, it is entirely possible that Trank had a smart vision for a Cronenberg-inspired horror take on the Fantastic Four, but we can see so little of that in the final cut, which had to apparently be wrestled away from him because he was so difficult for the cast and crew to deal with.

Fox certainly shares some of the blame here, even if only for giving a $155 million budget to someone who hasn't even worked with 1/10 of that before, but it's also clear that Trank flamed out under the pressure.