Can anyone remind me what were the first signs of this project was going bad?
I remember being ok with the Trank announcement and then later being happy when the director replacement talk started.
What did he do early on that turned you off? (I'm Not talking about MBJ)
I think it's hard to pinpoint one moment.
I liked Trank when he was announced in 2012, but I also was concerned that he wasn't proven and I suspected Fox wanted someone young they could push around. Jeremy slater was also a complete unknown and there were numerous rewrites of the script and a very lengthy process to green-light the film after Trank was announced.
So all those things were red flags related to 'quality'.
Then around February of 2014, the cast started leaking out and, while they seemed like okay actors, they were completely wrong for the parts. And the weird thing with the cast was they were never actually announced by the studio - no press releases or official announcements, just reports from the trades that they had been signed.
Around the time of casting, we also saw the leaked synopsis that described them as being used as weapons. Trank specifically denied that on Twitter, but then the Fox lawyers made everyone take it down - leading to the question: "If it's not theirs, how can they make "intellectual property claims"?
Also around that time, production kept being pushed off. It was originally scheduled to start in March, but then it moved to April and eventually May.
At some point in there, Trank had his first mini-melt-down and his initial Twitter account disappeared.
Then as you mention, in March 2014 we had the report that the studio was looking to replace Trank completely.
In May, they reported production had started, but we couldn't see anything really happening on the ground. There were no big street closures or anything else you would expect for a large-scale production. The production came and went very quickly and quietly which seemed to point to it being a low-budget effort (and of course we knew their were no big stars, so all that led to questions about how committed the studio was to the project). Actual production went from mid-May to early July which seemed very short (in hindsight much shorter than reshoots)
Then in July, Fox didn't present so much as a logo at Comic-Con while films like BVS which opened long after FF were presenting actual clips.
In October, a Hyper from Baton Rouge sent me a private message saying Trank had been fired and was no longer working on the film. In November, rumors that there had been serious problems on set came out and there were reports that Trank showed up high, late or not at all and he trashed a house causing large amounts of damage.
In January or February, Bleeding cool reported that people within Fox were saying the film was 'a mess' and massive reshoots with rebuilt sets would be required. Some time around there, some of the first official photos started coming out and they showed terrible, drab production design with 'containment suits' that were voted by the majority of people in this forum as 'The Ugliest in Superhero Film History'.
When the first trailer came out in February, it didn't feature anything that looked like the FF, and it seemed dull and drab with no hint of a story.
In the period between the first and second trailers, we had reports from Baton Rouge that extensive reshoots were, indeed, taking place.
The second trailer showed something that looked a little more 'fun', but it was suspiciously edited and only showed very short clips. As additional clips were released, they all seemed to be variations of those same scenes, so it seemed like there was a very small amount of action and humor, but those few scenes were being used over and over again to misrepresent the film as something it wasn't. A shot of Sue laughing was used over and over again in different spots to try to make unfunny lines appear funny.
Generally speaking the promotional material looked cheap and unprofessional. None of the clips showed any drama or character interaction. We didn't see anything that lasted more than a few seconds at a time and didn't get any feel for how the actors actually interacted.
Kinberg and Trank provided a number of interviews, but they spent all that time deflecting criticism, accusing the fans of being 'unfair', talking about racial issues and just generally avoiding talking about good things related to the film.
Then the review embargo, short running time and that brings us to today - the day the box office numbers go in the book and this becomes a certified disaster.
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