The history of the Fantastic Four film franchise is like a malfunctioning portal to the Marvel multiverse: each time you step through you land in a slightly more rubbish timeline. The 2005 and 2007 films were riddled with 00s cheese, as if comic book movies were being reimagined with a hokey daytime TV sheen. The Bold and the Beautiful with Ioan Gruffudd as a sentient bottle of Brylcreem; Jessica Alba as a glowing-eyed mannequin struggling to emote through industrial-strength contacts; Michael Chiklis trapped in what looked like a spray-painted novelty boulder from a 1990s Disneyland stunt show.
Then came Fantastic Four in 2015, a reboot so mind-numbingly appalling that if it had existed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Time Variance Authority would have wanted to prune it from existence before it ever hit cinemas. Directed by Josh Trank, who later all but disowned it, the film promised a dark and doomy reimagining but was instead the superhero equivalent of a half-finished Ikea shelf: structurally unstable, missing key components, and abandoned by its creators before anyone could make sense of the instructions.
Which brings us to The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the MCU’s first, belated (for complex contractual reasons) foray into portraying Marvel’s first family. Directed by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman, it stars The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal, The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn of Stranger Things, and The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Its first trailer debuted this week, and there’s already a sense that Marvel may have found the secret recipe that eluded 20th Century Fox for the best part of two decades.
In First Steps, Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, and Sue and Johnny Storm appear to exist in a retrofuturist 1960s-inspired universe that feels like something halfway between Wes Anderson and The Jetsons. It’s an Apollo-era sideways take on planet Earth, but they might as well be living on Ego the Living Planet for all the resemblance this place has to the central MCU. This, it must be said, is a great idea, allowing the studio to nod knowingly to the superhero team’s Silver Age roots while also keeping this episode smartly hived off from the main Marvel reality. It allows for an origins-story feel, though it looks from the trailer as though we’ll be witnessing the iconic episode in which the quartet gain their magical powers in flashback.
The Fantastic Four, as dreamers, explorers and pioneers of the impossible, simply have to feel like a big deal. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s trailblazing creations were foundational figures in Marvel’s 1960s comic book revolution: a reality-warping, imagination-igniting superheroic force of nature who cracked open the universe like an infinite, star-stuffed geode.
For decades, Hollywood has fumbled this wide-eyed, pioneering spirit, cementing Marvel’s most groundbreaking superhero ensemble in dull, earthbound mediocrity rather than letting them soar through the celestial expanse. If First Steps can capture the necessary sense of eternal cosmic wonder, the thrill of discovery, and the team’s roles as wide-eyed explorers rather than just another set of spandex-clad CGI brawlers, then maybe, just maybe, it will finally give the Fantastic Four the cinematic future they deserve.
