Miles Teller has said the notorious failure of his 2015 Fantastic Four film was the result of “one really important person who kind of f***ed it all up.”
Widely panned upon release, the movie was mauled by critics and flopped commercially, earning just $168 million on a $120 million production budget. Now, lead actor Miles Teller has placed the project’s failure squarely on a particular individual — and it doesn’t take much to guess who he’s referring to.
“When I first saw the movie, I remember talking to one of the studio heads and said, ‘I think we’re in trouble,'” Teller said in an interview on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM talk show, per Variety, while praising his on-screen co-stars. “It’s unfortunate for that, because so many people worked so hard on that movie,” Teller concluded. “And honestly, maybe there was one really important person who kind of f***ed it all up.”
“As a young actor at that time, it’s like, ‘Alright, if you want to be taken seriously as a leading man, you got to get on this superhero train. That was our chance,” Teller said. “And the casting, I thought, was spectacular. I love all those actors.”
Fantastic Four starred Whiplash and Top Gun: Maverick actor Teller as Reed Richards, with House of Cards’ Kate Mara as Sue Storm, Black Panther’s Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm and Billy Elliot’s Jamie Bell as The Thing. The project was directed by Josh Trank, who won a Razzie Award for his work.
“Flame on? More like a flameout for this dreary reboot of the Fantastic Four,” IGN wrote in its 5/10 Fantastic Four review at the time.
Past reports have suggested that Trank repeatedly clashed with scriptwriter Jeremy Slater over their differing visions for the project, and that the film’s cast were not confident of the movie’s prospects even during production. 20th Century Fox later demanded reshoots, after being unsatisfied with an early cut.
In more recent years, Trank himself has admitted his shortcomings on the project, and suggested he had still been too green for so big a movie. “What I tried to do with Fantastic Four was so arrogant for somebody who hadn’t really gotten the handle of his own skill set as a filmmaker to do that kind of stuff with it,” he said in 2020.
Following the movie’s failure, a planned sequel featuring Daredevil and Deadpool was canned and the superhero team was left on ice for a decade — until this year’s MCU reboot of the characters arrived to a warmer response.
Image credit: Gary Gershoff/Getty Images
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
