Josh Trank and Fox’s Fantastic Four disputes ruined what actually, at one point, promised to be a good movie. Is it time to redefine what it means to be the director of a superhero movie?

Anyone who ever takes a film studies class will know that the following is — or has been — true about the movie industry: film is a director’s medium.

This is often contrasted to television, which has traditionally been the writers’ place to shine.

But what about the increasingly popular cinematic universes that are blurring the lines between serialized and one-punch storytelling?

We’ll take a look at the conventions of film and TV directing in order to examine what seems to be an increasingly common problem in the superhero movie industry: the lack of clarity about just how much control a director should have over a cinematic universe “episode.”

A short history of Hollywood cinema: The director is king

From Alfred Hitchcock and Ridley Scott to Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino, there is no question that the director is at the top of the traditional Hollywood totem pole. The director is the one with the initial vision. They might write the script, or commission a screenwriter to commit their idea to the page, but everything is done because they want it, how they want it, and when they want it.

If the director doesn’t write the script themselves, they’ll oversee the writing process very carefully. They’ll demand rewrites and tweaks, they’ll listen to ideas but never agree to anything that compromises their vision. They’ll be in charge of every aspect of pre-production, production and post-production.

Of course, as Hollywood has become more commercial and studio-driven, directors aren’t always the ones who come to movie studios with a big idea. Certainly, the big names still do — someone like Woody Allen or Wes Anderson would never commit to a project they couldn’t completely make their own — but with the influx of adaptations and reboots, more often than not directors are commissioned for existing projects.

Still, there is an expectation that once a director agrees to commit the next two to five years of their lives to a movie, it becomes theirs.

There’s a reason we use words like “helm” and “take the reins” when reporting that a director has signed on for a new project. Whenever a new Harry Potter or Twilight director was named, for example, it signaled a major shift in tone for that movie series. Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter was jarringly different from Alfonso Cuarón’s. Perhaps some fans might argue that this tonal dissonance wasn’t a good thing, but that’s how the medium works (or worked). The director is king.

But is this an increasingly rare phenomenon in our modern, dense, cutthroat media landscape, which is blurring the lines between the movie and TV industries?

The showrunner as the ‘director’ of a TV series

While directors rule on the movie set, they are hardly ever mentioned when we talk about television. In general, when we talk about television, we talk about the showrunner.

The TV showrunner is, in many ways, the equivalent of a movie director. As showrunner tends to equal executive producer, they usually oversee everything from budgeting and casting to set design and editing. They’re not involved to the extent a movie director might be, simply because of the nature of the beast: Composing a one-and-a-half hour movie is a lot different than controlling every minute detail of a 20-hour long storytelling extravaganza (unless you have eight years like Peter Jackson).

The power balance between showrunner and TV network is just as fluid and confusing as that between director and movie studio. Depending on the showrunner’s pedigree and how much freedom the network is willing to give them, the non-creative producers will offer notes and request changes as they see fit. When high-concept series fail, it is often because a network hires a showrunner to helm a series, then tries to take over the creative vision. This is, as we’ll see, not that different from what sometimes happens in the superhero movie genre.

But when a TV show works, it’s usually because a showrunner has a strong vision, and because the network trusts them with complete creative control of their series. That means carefully crafting storylines and character arcs with a team of writers who know the show and its characters inside and out, and who are tasked with ensuring that all-important week-to-week consistency. For better or worse, it is the showrunner who is either praised or blamed for the show as a whole.

For television series, directors are usually commissioned (the way screenwriters might be for movies), and their freedoms are severely limited. The director hasn’t been sitting in the writers’ room for eight hours debating whether a character should say “I need” or “I want,” and they simply don’t have the power to change lines or motivation on a whim. Depending on the director’s overall involvement with the show, they might have more room to play, but their work must always conform to the show’s overall conventions.

The writers are the ones who stick around, at least for a season. The showrunner and their team are the ones with the power to tell the story they want to tell, the way they want to tell it.

All of this leads us to the relatively new concept of a serialized cinematic universe, which seems to demand a combination of the movie director and TV showrunner models.

On page 2: Changing tides, the blame game, and where we go from here

The cinematic universe: A disturbance in the Force

Some might argue that Marvel president Kevin Feige is, for all intents and purposes, the showrunner of the MCU. Feige is the person who takes each Marvel movie from conception to release, and he is the person who hires writers, producers, and directors, who are all expected to work toward Marvel’s overall endgame.

But the showrunner analogy only works as far as ensuring the movies’ continuity. Because there is, of course, an expectation for cinema to be a spectacle, a standalone experience. Marvel movies are not two-hour TV episodes broadcast on gigantic screens; at least, that’s not the way they’re being sold to us.

In 2010, Joss Whedon was brought on to helm — in the traditional sense — The Avengers. Two years before the movie’s release, he began working on the script, and by the time The Avengers arrived on the big screen, there was no doubt that this was Whedon’s movie.

In the time between Avengers and the 2015 follow-up Age of Ultron, however, the superhero movie industry had changed dramatically, and as Marvel Studios became more successful, their agenda became more specific. While Whedon didn’t introduce most of the Avengers in the first movie, he did introduce their team dynamic, and his vision was strong and undeniable. (In fact, some fans argue that his vision was so strong, his Avengers were acting out of character.)

By contrast, Ultron was a compromise, and it seems like neither Whedon nor Marvel were truly prepared for this shift in control. And, unfortunately, fans were left disappointed. Where The Avengers‘ tone was consistent and its storyline crystal clear, Ultron was more like a confused hopscotch of clashing ideas with a serious identity crisis. Much like, well, Ultron.

Whedon himself was openly disappointed with the process, and has said in several interviews that the movie he planned — the movie he shot — was heavily altered in the editing process.

Speaking about a scene with Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, which was cut from the final edit, Whedon said he “understood the decision” to take it out, indicating that it wasn’t his call. When asked why neither Spider-Man nor Captain Marvel were in the movie, Whedon expressed regret that the studio didn’t finalize deals in time to include them.

In a very telling example of how little control Whedon had during the editing process this time around, Whedon explained why the much-criticized cave scene from Age of Ultron was included despite his wishes.

“With the cave, it really turned into: They pointed a gun at the farm’s head and said, ‘Give us the cave, or we’ll take out the farm’ — in a civilized way,” he recalled in a podcast interview. “I respect these guys, they’re artists, but that’s when it got really, really unpleasant. I was so beaten down at that point that I was like, ‘Sure, OK — what movie is this?’ And the editors were like, ‘No. You have to show the [events in the cave]. You can’t just say it.'”

The fact that Whedon and Marvel’s producers were butting heads and grappling for a shaky middle ground clearly shows in the final cut of the movie. And this director/studio clash is far from an isolated incident.

Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor called his Marvel experience “wrenching,” saying he had to “collaborate a lot” on the movie, and recalled, “I was sort of given absolute freedom while we were shooting, and then in post it turned into a different movie.”

Over in the DC/Warner Bros. camp, Patty Jenkins — who actually left Thor 2, citing creative differences — took over from Michelle MacLaren as the director of Wonder Woman. MacLaren left because of (you guessed it) creative differences.

Then there was Ava DuVernay, who recently revealed her decision to turn down Black Panther. Explaining how she could possibly pass on what was indubitably a huge, potentially career-defining project, DuVernay explained that she (wisely) recognized that she would have to give up her autonomy in order to create a movie that had already been defined by the studio.

“This is my art. It’s important to me that [it] be true to who I was in this moment,” she said. “And if there’s too much compromise, it really wasn’t going to be an Ava DuVernay film.”

A sobering reality check like DuVernay’s would probably have saved some of the above-mentioned directors a lot of grief.

The superhero movie: Whose art is it anyway?

Now, here’s the thing: No one wants or expects Marvel to relinquish control of individual installments of their pre-planned series in order to allow incoming directors to make standalone pieces of film history. That would defeat the purpose of the cinematic universe. Fans don’t necessarily want an Ava DuVernay film — they want a Black Panther film.

More importantly though, fans want a film that works. Whether it’s the studio’s vision or the director’s, the vision itself needs to be strong. And it needs to be consistent. As became painfully obvious this month, the last thing you want to see on the big screen is a failed compromise.

So, from the perspective of a consumer, the problem isn’t so much who gets the final creative say, but that the pecking order needs to be established for this grey area of Hollywood film-making. Because while we might think it reasonable for a superhero movie director to defer to the studio, they are not, as far as anyone is aware (least of all the directors themselves), the equivalent of a TV director.

There is, after all, still an expectation for each movie to carry the brand of its director. It matters who Marvel and Warner Bros. chooses for each project. The Batman trilogy unquestionably belongs to Christopher Nolan. Man of Steel is, most certainly, a Zack Snyder film. Guardians of the Galaxy has James Gunn written all over it, and that film is a damn treasure.

And when Edgar Wright departed Ant-Man, it was as jarring of a shift as when Guillermo del Toro backed out of The Hobbit.

By all accounts, Marvel was happy with Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man until close to the start of production. But as Kevin Feige became increasingly worried about Wright’s take on the movie, he began ordering script rewrites without Wright’s consent. Like MacLaren and Jenkins, Wright chose to walk away rather than stay on board a project that no longer felt like his own.

The commercial success of Ant-Man proves that Marvel probably did the right thing by finding a director whose creative vision meshed better with their own. Yet fans are left with the nagging suspicion that — while Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man was perfectly fine — Edgar Wright’s would have been spectacular.

When big-name directors are being replaced by lesser-known, relatively untested directors — who in many cases come from the TV industry — it is hardly a coincidence. Alan Taylor, Patty Jenkins and Peyton Reed (all replacements brought in after “creative differences” disputes) have a background in TV directing. So does Josh Trank (we’ll get to him in a minute). They’re likely selected at least partly because of their expected lack of ego and their ability to compromise, but (at least in Taylor and Trank’s cases) it might not be what they expected when they agreed to direct a massive Hollywood studio movie.

If big studios with cinematic universe plans in place want to bring in directors who are willing to play to their tune, then that’s their prerogative. But they might want to think about rewording their “Director Wanted” ads, or we’ll get a lot more movies like Fantastic Four.

‘Fantastic Four’ — Hollywood’s wake-up call?

You all know the story, even if you haven’t seen the movie yet: Simply put, Fantastic Four tanked. It blew. It sucked. It stunk. (At least, according to Rotten Tomatoes, where it scored an abysmal 8%.)

Director Josh Trank blames the studio. The studio blames Josh Trank.

Trank has spoken for years about the dark, body horror, genre-defying movie he had planned. He claims that the movie he shot was “fantastic” (a word we hope he now only uses ironically), and that it fell apart during editing, where rumor has it he was completely shut out.

Fox, on the other hand, points to examples of on-set chaos, and Trank’s stress during the filming period, when explaining why their movie failed so spectacularly. They tried to fix what they perceived as being broken, perhaps prematurely, or perhaps as a legitimate effort to save Trank from himself.

It’s easy to pick sides. It’s easy to think we understand the situation based on anecdotes and second-hand accounts.

Ultimately, however, the end result speaks for itself: Fantastic Four fell apart, like a tiny matchstick house, because there was no glue to hold it together. It was like if two different artists shared one canvas, and one started painting a bowl of fruit while the other was trying to cover it up with an abstract inferno.

Fantastic Four is a perfect, shining, indisputable example of the superhero genre’s current director dissonance, where instead of cooperation toward a shared vision, we have two very different, equally stubborn sides pulling the project apart.

Looking at the many examples of studio/director disputes, it seems like the more one side is willing to relinquish creative control, the less of a mess the final movie becomes (whether it sways in the director’s or the studio’s favor). Much too often, however, we’re left with the could-have-beens, the regrets and the missed opportunities. Which is a damn waste of everyone’s time and money.

As consumers, we only want a good end product. We want something memorable and fresh, but we also expect the cinematic universes to feel connected, and add up to a greater whole.

But the balance between individuality and conformity just isn’t there yet. The word “director” doesn’t mean what it used to, and when we’re talking about cinematic universes, maybe it shouldn’t. Clearly, there is a need for a new definition. There is a need for communication, and transparency, from all parties.

Sometimes it works out. The Russo Brothers and Marvel seem to have a brilliant relationship. Zack Snyder is helming the Batman v Superman franchise, seemingly to Warner Bros.’ liking. But the kinks need working out — “too many cooks in the kitchen” is a cliché for a reason.