I suspect many viewers of the new The Fantastic Four: First Steps won’t even realize it has anything to do with the Avengers or Spider-Man, and that may be just as well. Only about two movies from each batch (or “Phase”) of a half-dozen or so Marvel releases in the 2020s have been really good: Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (and maybe Thor: Love and Thunder) in Phase IV, Deadpool & Wolverine and Thunderbolts* (and maybe Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) in Phase V.
But First Steps launches Phase VI by making no mention of any of that, nor the previously intended mega-villain Kang the Conqueror, aside from a small dash of multiverse nomenclature (we’re on Earth-828 here) and a long-overdue explicit homage to Jack Kirby at the very end. This movie’s in multiple senses off in its own world, and it’s a very nice world—retro-futurist in much the same mid-20th-meets-mid-21st-century way that the Fantastic Four-influenced animated projects The Venture Bros. and The Incredibles were. If Hollywood, always seeking a simple formula for making hits, draws the derivative conclusion that audiences crave more Venture Bros. and Incredibles, that’s fine by me. I, at least, crave more of those, and a good Tom Swift adaptation wouldn’t hurt either.
Knowing Hollywood, it might, however, draw one of two wrong conclusions if First Steps is a big hit, as it deserves to be: either that superhero movies should be shorn of connections to other superhero movies (completely contradicting the pro-continuity wisdom that built the interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe just a few years ago) or, even more erroneously, that Hollywood’s so wonderful and smart and self-sustaining that it should only do remakes of its own prior output, here arguably doing a very loose remake of 2007’s mediocre Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
This movie in fact succeeds despite any resemblance to that earlier film (though that one was OK in its low-aiming, kid-pleasing way), and I will always think it strange and high-risk that Marvel Studios chose to crank out something so similar to that earlier (pre-MCU) project, not that I’m complaining. I guess movie pitches, as parodied in the film The Player, really do have to promise backers that the new thing (so to speak) will be just like that previous thing but better. In any case, it works this time.
The Thing is crusty but loveable and possibly Jewish. The planet-eating Galactus feels genuinely vast and scary. The Fantastic Four’s headquarters feels like a gleaming glimpse of a better, more mechanized tomorrow and a warm home at the same time. The montages depicting how famous and beloved the Fantastic Four are throughout the world are upbeat and fun, showing just enough secondary characters (including the Mole Man) and random weirdness to provide the broader mosaic that might have seemed painfully absent since there are no bits of the MCU’s familiar Earth-616 on display.
First Steps’ subtitle is simultaneously evocative of the giant footfalls of the menacing Galactus, the baby steps of infant Franklin Richards, the lunar imprints of Neil Armstrong, this first immersion in the milieu of Earth-828, and (only for those who remember) the wording of Nick Fury’s post-credits pep talk to Iron Man (about entering a broader universe of heroes) at the end of the first MCU movie.
It’s miraculous, really, that after some 90 years of DC and Marvel stories (under various changing company names), we ended up with two fun, immersion-in-a-broader-world, big-screen introductions to those universes coming out in the same month, respectively Superman (which I wrote about last week) and now First Steps—the Last Son of Krypton and Marvel’s First Family—each aiming to assure the viewer (and studio investors, no doubt) that there are all sorts of other characters and stories crammed into the toy boxes of which we’ve gotten only tiny peeks in these two movies.
The only thing more nerd-pleasing than this month at the cinema, really, would’ve been if these two movies had contained little shout-outs to each other, coordinated by Superman director James Gunn and Fantastic Four director Matt Shakman (Shakman also being known for episodes of the frenetic comedy quasi-family in the great sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and for another lumbering, skyscraper-smashing menace sometimes nicknamed “the Big G,” namely Godzilla as seen in the current TV series Monarch, not to mention for the self-aware period-piece comedy in the Marvel TV series WandaVision). Both directors have senses of humor, grant them that. After several dark-and-serious-yet-lame movies from both DC and Marvel, it’s nice to see each franchise able to pick itself up and dust itself off with a chuckle this month. The battle’s not yet lost.
By the way, two comics writers who should’ve been here to enjoy this nerdy July with us but unfortunately passed away in the prior two months are Peter David and Jim Shooter, respectively at ages 68 and 73 (but 14, famously, when Shooter began writing the comic book Legion of Super-Heroes). If there are kids reading this column, you’re thinking those sound like super-old ages at which to die, but you’re wrong, and it was too soon, even if one of them was sometimes regarded as (tall and) evil and the other as (pudgy and) goofy.
I didn’t concoct any elaborate homage to either man, but this month I thought of the thousand-years-hence Legion a few times while finally watching the mostly fourth-millennium-set (and gratuitously trans/gay and mostly bad) TV series Star Trek: Discovery and noticed Peter David’s contributions while watching low-budget, laughably-trashy but comedically self-aware 1980s/90s time travel movie series Trancers.
No man deserves to be remembered only for his involvement in Trancers (better that David should be remembered as the man who took over the reins of the fine sci-fi comic book series Dreadstar when its creator, Jim Starlin, who also created Marvel uber-villain Thanos, left the series, that being about as bold a switch in creative tones as, well, going from Man of Steel to Superman). But then, as David instructs viewers in the moronic Trancers 4: Jack of Swords, a wizard never really dies, he’s only metaphysically inconvenienced. Perhaps we will one day soon be saying the very same thing not only about Peter David but about Doctor Doom.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.