Three years ago, it was officially announced at San Diego Comic-Con that Marvel Studios has Fantastic Four on the way, and at this past weekend’s SDCC, it was revealed that the upcoming Marvel movie will be part of the Phase 6 lineup, alongside two new Avengers movies. So assuming there won’t be a delay, we can look forward to the return of Marvel’s First Family to the big screen in under two and a half years, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has revealed one key way this Fantastic Four reboot will differ from the past film series centered on these superheroes: there won't be another origin story.
Not counting the unreleased The Fantastic Four from 1994, we’ve seen two cinematic depictions of how Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm gained their superpowers through the respective 2005 and 2015 takes on Fantastic Four. Well, while speaking with THR, Kevin Feige stated that the Marvel Cinematic Universe would not be retreading this territory, adding:
A lot of people know this origin story. 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.
So this next Fantastic Four movie will be following in the footsteps of the MCU’s Spider-Man, because when we first met Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War, he’d already been swinging around and fighting crime for a while, and he only briefly mentioned being bitten by that spider in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean the Fantastic Four’s origin won’t be referenced, or maybe the movie could take a cue from The Incredible Hulk and show how Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, The Thing and The Human Torch came to be in the opening credits. But as Kevin Feige made clear, we will not be seeing their origin as the focus of the story given how so many people already know it, which will help this movie stand out from what we got in 2005 and 2015.
That clears up one aspect of the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, but there are still a lot of other questions that need to be answered. For one thing, it was announced in December 2020 that MCU Spider-Man trilogy helmer Jon Watts would direct Fantastic Four, but in April, Watts stepped away from the reboot because he wanted to take a break from superhero movies. So there’s still no word on who will replace Watts as director. It also remains to be seen if John Krasinski, who appeared as Earth-838’s Mister Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, will star as the main version of the hero in Fantastic Four or if another actor will be cast in the role. It could be a while before we learn that information and who will play the other three leads.
For now though, Fantastic Four is slated to kick off the MCU’s Phase 6 on November 8, 2024, and CinemaBlend will share more updates about it as they trickle in. For now, the latest Marvel movie, Thor: Love and Thunder, is still playing in theaters, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will conclude Phase 4 on November 11.
