Fantastic Four Just Confirmed One Refreshing Marvel Promise
The age of origin stories seems to be behind us.
Back in 2022, Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige vowed that the new Fantastic Four MCU reboot would not be an origin story per se, but instead present something different, while also reintroducing these heroes into the larger continuity. "A lot of people know this origin,” Feige said three years ago. “A lot of people know the basics. How do we take that and bring something that they've never seen before? We've set a very high bar for ourselves with bringing that to the screen.”
Now, with the launch of the first full trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, it appears that Marvel is sticking to that promise and, possibly, sustaining a new trend in superhero movies that crosses over to other Marvel movies and the DC universe, too.
The new trailer for First Steps seems to present the titular Fantastic Four in a kind of present tense, in which they are already in their superhero guises. This suggests that the origin of their superpowers — in which cosmic rays during a spaceflight changed them forever — will be an event presented in flashback only. During the trailer, Reed Richard (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) seem to reminisce about the fateful event that made them who they are. As Reed says, “Before we went up the first time, you couldn’t turn invisible, Ben wasn’t a rock, and Johnny never caught fire...”
By “went up,” Reed is clearly talking about going to space. This suggests that through the course of the new film, the Fantastic Four will have to return to space, perhaps to do battle with the massive Marvel baddie known as Galactus. Either way, it seems that the plot of First Steps won’t recount the origin of the powers of the Fantastic Four, at least not in a linear way. Clearly, the movie will acknowledge their past because that transformation is part of what makes the characters interesting. In fact, some of the more affecting moments in the trailer linger on Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) remembering what he used to look like before being transformed into the Thing.
The cast of The Fantastic Four launch their new trailer.
But just like the 2022 version of Batman or the upcoming new Superman film, it appears that Marvel, like DC, wants to give the audience the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the backstories of various famous superheroes. While this strategy certainly makes sense for the casual introduction of Spider-Man (Tom Holland) into the MCU back in 2016, it seems slightly riskier for The Fantastic Four, and, potentially, whatever the next iteration of the X-Men ends up being in the MCU.
That said, The Fantastic Four: First Steps won’t exactly lack an origin story, it just seems that the film will present some aspects of backstory where backstory belongs: in the background of the film’s central narrative. Because if the larger goal of this film is to integrate these classic Marvel characters into the rest of the MCU, having them move from this timeline to another, means they’ll need as little baggage as possible.
