"Fantastic Four" director Josh Trank took to Twitter on Thursday night and blamed the film's studio, 20th Century Fox, for the film's disappointing reviews.
Trank quickly deleted the tweet, but Variety took a screengrab of it while it was still online:
The film has been slaughtered by critics; on Friday morning it had a 9% rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. (To put that in perspective, "Pixels," the only other summer movie the critics universally hated, has an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes.)
Some reactions toward the film include blurbs such as JoBlo's Movie Emporium's: "...this is like a generic TV pilot for a show you wouldn’t want to watch...." And The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "'Fantastic Four' feels like a 100-minute trailer for a movie that never happens."
This is the latest controversy for a film that has been dealing with bad press since the reboot of the Marvel superheroes was announced. There has been internet scorn over casting and rumors that Trank was erratic on set (which may have caused him to lose his directing gig on a "Star Wars" spin-off).
Despite Trank's views and those of the critics, early box-office projections have "Fantastic Four" topping the weekend grosses with an estimated $45 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
