Fantastic Four Is About To Double Down On A Risky Sci-Fi Trope
An MCU movie about astronauts?
In most movie adaptations of The Fantastic Four, the idea that the titular superhero group were astronauts before getting their powers is almost always treated as the backstory, not the main event. But new hints about The Fantastic Four: First Steps seem to suggest that the one way in which this version will be different isn’t about alternate timelines or even the larger MCU multiverse. Instead, it sounds like this Fantastic Four will focus more on the astronaut aspect than any other version that has come before.
In a new interview with Empire, director Matt Shakman said: “This is very much about the spirit of the Space Race... It’s imagining these four going into space instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.”
In the 2005 Fantastic Four film, Johnny Storm, Sue Storm, Reed Richard, and Ben Grimm have their space accident within the first 15 minutes of the movie. In the 2015 version, it’s about 40 minutes in. But, what Shakman is suggesting about First Steps is that the idea that these characters are astronauts takes up a bigger part of the story than the idea that they are superheroes.
“This idea is that they are the most famous people in America because they’re adventurers, explorers, astronauts — not because they're superheroes,” he says. “And they come back, and they're superheroes on top of it. But primarily they're astronauts, they're family.”
In addition to these thematic comments, Shakman also noted that the look and feel of the film will be more analog than some previous MCU movies set in space, saying that “I really wanted it to feel like it was made in 1965, the way Stanley Kubrick would have made it.”
Again, these comments from Shakman seem to suggest that the space travel aspect of Fantastic Four will be a much bigger deal than in any FF movie to date. And, on top of all of that, of course, is the idea that the film itself takes place in an alternate version of the 1960s space race, a tricky sci-fi trope that only a few other franchises have attempted. (Perhaps, most notably, the Apple TV+ hit series For All Mankind.)
Obviously, some of the bigger questions fans have about The Fantastic Four: First Steps is how it all ties into the larger MCU. We know this is a different timeline than what happened on the primary MCU Earth, so wondering what will become of this version of history is a normal question. It seems very possible that by the end of the movie, the Fantastic Four will leave their universe for Earth-616.
But, before any of that happens, and before First Steps begins to set up Avengers: Doomsday, this movie seems to be about something a Marvel movie has never really been about before: astronauts, boldly going where no superheroes have gone before.
