"When it came down to it, I found a lot of pretty heavy pushback on casting a black woman in that role."
There's no denying that 'Fantastic Four' was, despite the best intentions of its director, an absolute mess of a movie.
It derailed the career of director Josh Trank, ensured that no future 'Fantastic Four' movies would be made until it came under the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and nobody can even remember what it was actually about.
Anyone with a cursory understanding of the movie's troubled production would be able to deduce that the movie we all saw (or didn't, as it turned out to be) wasn't what Trank had intended. While the problems may have escalated during filming, it seems clear he was meeting resistance from the outset.
In a recent interview on the First Cut podcast, Trank explained that he originally planned for Sue Storm / Invisible Woman, to be played by a black woman. Johnny Storm and Franklin Storm were both played by black actors, Michael B. Jordan and Reg E. Cathey respectively, while Sue Storm was adopted.
As Trank tells it, "when you’re dealing with a studio on a massive movie like that, everybody wants to keep an open mind to who the big stars are going to be... When it came down to it, I found a lot of pretty heavy pushback on casting a black woman in that role."
As you'd expect, the casting of a black man in the role of Johnny Storm / Human Torch resulted in racist backlash. For Trank, however, he admits that not pushing the issue of casting Sue Storm as a black woman was a mistake. "When I look back on that, I should have just walked when that realization hit me, and I feel embarrassed about that, that I didn’t just out of principle," he said.