This summer’s Fantastic 4 film will be the 37th instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise, and there is nothing its trailer would like you to think about less than that. “First Steps,” insists the subtitle – never mind that seven previous incarnations of Marvel’s so-called First Family have made it to the screen already; three times in cinemas (sort of; we’ll get to that) and four on television.
“You don’t recognise me!” beams the new Marvel Studios emblem – rejigged to resemble the Cinerama logo which since the 1950s has been synonymous with good old-fashioned spectacle for the masses. The online release of the trailer itself was artificially ‘delayed’ – no content conveyor belt here, folks – with an hour-long countdown in the style of a rocket launch followed by 10 minutes of live conversation with the four leads, Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.
Even its opening shot of the Baxter Building foyer resembles curtains opening on an empty stage. Ant-Man and the Wasp? We don’t know them. New Captain America? We didn’t even meet the old one. After nearly two decades of world-building, and approaching six years of franchise decline, the big Marvel thumb finally appears to have come down on the red button marked ‘Fresh Start.
In theory, the Fantastic Four should be ideally suited to this purpose. They were the first classic Marvel characters to be dreamt up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the creative duo who would go on to invent the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, Black Panther, and almost every other Avenger on whose brawny backs brand Marvel was built. From their 1961 debut, as chirpy avatars of US nuclear-age derring-do, they were the blue-eyed embodiment of American pop culture’s clean slate.
Yet for all of the trailer’s pristine sheen, the spectres of prior live-action Fantastic Fours still loom large in the minds of those unlucky enough to have sat through any or all of them. There was the unreleased Roger Corman take from the early 1990s, made by a German producer, Bernd Eichinger, for $1 million, primarily so he could cling onto the rights, which he’d picked up in the 1980s on the cheap.
The film – a corny, Flash Gordon-esque romp – was shot with a cast of unknowns in the winter of 1992 and 1993, and scheduled for release in early 1994. But shortly before its January premiere – at a Minneapolis shopping centre, of all places – the negatives were seized and destroyed in a deal struck by Avi Arad, the veteran Marvel executive who would later found and chair Marvel Studios itself.
Jessica Alba and Ioan Gruffudd in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer – AP
Why? Because at that moment, a rogue, low-budget Marvel production was seen to jeopardise the value of the Fantastic Four brand – which was ironic, given what came next. With the quartet rescued from B-movie ignominy, development began on a blockbuster version, which was originally to be directed and co-written by Chris Columbus, of the first two Home Alone and Harry Potter films. But development stretched on like Reed Richards’ limbs, and after a few further iterations (including a 1960s period piece sketched out by future Ant-Man director Peyton Reed), Barbershop and Taxi’s Tim Story took the wheel, and a very noughties-pin-up cast (Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, a pre-Captain America Chris Evans) was assembled.
Fantastic Four: The First One, Honest was released in 2005: around eight months after the very concept of a superhero family had been wittily and movingly deconstructed in The Incredibles, the enormous global Pixar hit. In that unfortunate context, FF ‘05 felt almost aggressively shallow: sci-fi action via mid market lad magazine. (Indeed, Alba was 9th on FHM’s Hundred Sexiest Women chart the following year, and topped it the year after that.)
But Story’s original take was popular enough for Fox to task him with rushing out a (worse still) sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer, within the next two years. Reviews weren’t notably worse, but Fox executives noted the profit margin had narrowed: a slightly larger budget plus slightly lower takings meant this was a franchise that had to be rethought. Warner Bros had Christopher Nolan’s Batman; Marvel Studios were readying Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. How could the Fantastic Four be reworked to meet the demands of a newly sincere and ambitious superhero marketplace?
The answer was: catastrophically. Work on a reboot began in 2009 and plopped and bubbled away for five years. Its director, Josh Trank, was a promising up-and-comer who had made his name with the found-footage superhero indie Chronicle, while the cast, Miles Teller, Michael B Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell, had the acting chops and diverse heritage the form now required.
What they didn’t have, it transpired, was a healthy working environment or a functional final script: Mara later made allusions to the “horrible” climate on set, while Trank’s original bleak, downbeat take – odd for a famously colourful, upbeat property – was heavily reshot and recut, with a climatic sequence that was partly written on set the day it was filmed. (Trank disowned the film on social media the day before its release.)
The result barely scraped back its $120 million production budget worldwide – this, at a time when even Ant-Man was making half a billion – and again, Marvel’s former A-team found themselves benched. In light of all that, as well as a general wearying of the broader Marvel project, it’s no wonder that the new trailer goes out of its way to promise novelty, while notably lacking even the slightest gesture towards any of the preceding Marvel films.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach as The Thing, in Marvel’s new Fantastic 4 film
Despite the 1960s retro-futurist stylings, from the swoopingly sleek design of the Fantasti-Car design to the appearance from robotic sidekick H.E.R.B.I.E., it feels tonally closest to the Story films, albeit with a twist of 2020s earnestness. (“Whatever life throws at us, face it together,” muses Kirby’s Sue Storm, while Quinn’s Johnny Storm’s flight into the atmosphere, during which his Human Torch flames are extinguished, smacks a little of Sistine Chapel ceiling – mortal man within prodding range of God.)
Its dramatic credentials are slyly burnished with all those shots of Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm in the kitchen – a reference to the actor’s breakout role on the acclaimed series The Bear. And if the rock-skin visual effects look a little bit fake, then perhaps that’s indicative of a wider dawning problem within the superhero genre: as both artistry and technology in this field improve, the fundamental unreality of the ideas they’re realising only becomes more conspicuous. (The villain Galactus is played by none other than Ralph Ineson, aka Finchy from The Office, and kept largely hidden from us in the trailer.)
Still, along with James Gunn’s Superman – also due in cinemas this July – Fantastic 4: First Steps has more on its itinerary than the usual leap-tall-buildings, outrun-speeding-bullets checklist. Both films are out to haul their respective comic-book worlds out of their ruts, by restoring optimism and wonder to a now drab and cynical genre. To find a path to the future, both Marvel and DC are going back to their roots.
