Chronicle Filmmaker Now The Frontrunner To Direct The Fantastic Four Reboot

Josh Trank is a largely untested talent. While the young director did do five episodes of the television the series The Kill Point, he has to have a feature film released. But that all changes next month. Trank is the co-writer and director of Chronicle, a found-footage movie from 20th Century Fox about a group of teens that get superpowers. While the movie doesn't come out until February 3rd, apparently Fox is extremely high on the filmmaker right now, so much so that they may choose him to reboot one of their biggest potential franchises.

According to Variety, Trank is now the number one choice to bring The Fantastic Four back to the big screen. While the previous two films, which starred Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis, and Ioan Gruffudd, were huge successes at the box office - each pulling in at least $280 million internationally - both were critically panned, averaging only 32% on Rotten Tomatoes. Trank has already taken meetings with members of the studio about the project, but they are waiting to see how Chronicle does at the box office before pulling the trigger.

Thanks to a very small marketing campaign, we actually haven't gotten to see much from Chronicle yet, but it likely won't be hard for the movie to make money. Studios love found footage projects because they typically cost very little to make and result in great profit margins. The question is if the profits Chronicle makes will be enough to convince studio heads that Trank is the right guy for The Fantastic Four.

Eric Eisenberg
Assistant Managing Editor

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.