Marvel Studios laid out an exciting future at San Diego Comic-Con, revealing a number of new projects heading to both Disney+ and movie theaters through 2025. One film that fans already knew about going into Comic-Con was Fantastic Four, but Kevin Feige did have some new information to share about the highly anticipated MCU entry. Feige announced Fantastic Four will serve as the starting point of Phase 6 and is set to premiere Nov. 8, 2024. The Marvel boss also spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how the studio is hoping to bring Marvel’s First Family into the MCU in a unique way:
“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.”
Fantastic Four will step away from telling an origin story
Feige isn’t wrong when saying audiences are already very familiar with the Fantastic Four. The 2024 Marvel Studios film will, ironically, be the fourth big screen iteration of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Ben Grimm, and Johnny Storm. Tim Story directed a pair of Fantastic Four films in the mid-2000s, with the title characters being portrayed by Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Michael Chiklis, and Chris Evans. While there’s some nostalgia for the films, they were made in a pre-Iron Man world, so their quality was nowhere near the current day and age of comic book movies.
20th Century Fox tried to reboot the franchise in 2015 once the MCU had taken off, but Josh Trank’s version of the Fantastic Four was much maligned by critics and audiences. Feige and company will get their crack at the super team within the next two years, and it sounds like Marvel understands what it would mean to fans if a high-quality Fantastic Four film is added to the MCU pantheon.
Many paths the story could follow
Feige’s comments about the MCU Fantastic Four not being an origin story open up a number of different possibilities for how the film could come together. Introducing Reed, Sue, or Johnny in projects prior to the 2024 film could save Marvel from spending a significant amount of the runtime diving into each character’s backstory.
There have also been fan theories that the MCU’s Fantastic Four will actually be from a different universe, ending up in Earth-616 through some multiversal shenanigans. If Marvel goes that route, the studio could avoid the origin movie cliché of having the heroes obtain their powers and learn how to cope with them. Fantastic Four could also be similar to Spider-Man: Homecoming in that it’s alluded to how the team got their powers, but it’s not actually shown during the course of the film. There are plenty of ways Fantastic Four can differentiate itself from other franchise-starting films that have been produced within the MCU.
Fantastic Four is set to hit theaters in a little more than two years, so there’s plenty of time for Feige and the rest of the MCU brain trust to figure out the story for the Phase 6 kickoff. Obviously, having a director attached will go a long way in shaping the film, and Marvel is still searching for the right person to replace Jon Watts in the director’s chair. After receiving no substantial updates at Comic-Con, D23 in September could be the place where both the director and the Fantastic Four themselves are revealed to the world.
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