In the god awful 2015 Fantastic Four film, director Josh Trank supposedly wanted a black actress to portray Sue Storm in his film. This monstrosity of a film was the victim of Fox’s meddling in directorial vision. The initial film was a grounded realistic Superhero film but similarly to Suicide Squad and Justice League, it was forced to change in order to fall in line with the Avengers films. The film was a perfect example of why a film must be made by a director and not a studio. In production Fox had made the switch from disconnected films to attempting to built a solid universe with the X-men, Deadpool, Gambit, and the Fantastic Four all co-existing.
2015’s Fantastic Four opened to a abysmal ratings and a incredibly weak box office which can all be traced back to the franken-film that fox allowed to hit theaters. In recent months, Josh Trank has taken to Twitter to explain his original vision for the film and most notably in a recent interview, Trank claims he wanted the Storm family to be African-American. Michael B Jordan portrayed Johnny Storm and Trank had hoped to cast another African American Actress to portray Sue Storm. This idea however was met by push back from the studio.
Trank had this to say about the issue.
Hopefully in the future, Films studios can adopt an open mind towards casting different races in traditionally white roles, especially when the race of the character is unimportant to the overall character. I for one would love to see Michael B Jordan take up the mantle of Superman. #BlackLivesMatter