Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Director: Matt Shakman
Cast: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn.
Budget: $200 million approx
Box Office: $443 million (still on release)
Okay, so here's the thing... I saw this film within the first week of it coming out, so I could do a review of it for the site right away. Yet two weeks on, and... I'm still not really sure what I want to say about it.
Is it good? Sure. It's easily the best Fantastic Four movie to date, and even though this site has cast a kind and forgiving eye over the other live action movies featuring the group, none of them were great. But the issue is, I want to see it at least once more before posting a "proper" review.
The issue isn't that I had too much fizzy pop to drink in the cinema and had to take a toilet break more than once. Though that didn't help. But I'm not really sure how I feel about it yet. There's a lot going on in under two hours, and there's some nice moral dilemmas in the mix. One thing some previous FF movies have done is lean towards send-up, with the team's powers rendered "goofy", particularly Reed's. This is not to say that Ioan Gruffudd didn't do his best in 2005 and 2007, but when the content included reaching for a toilet roll and doing "stretch dancing", it's not a film that shows appropriate respect to the source material.
Surprisingly, a Marvel film is the one that treats the team with the most seriousness. I say "surprisingly", because the majority of the Marvel films have "comedy" elements in them that are often torturous to watch, meta humour that takes you completely out of the film. While there was no need for Ben to grow a beard, and the Mole Man is someone "doing a turn", this movie generally delivers a FF movie that takes its characters seriously.
And yet... maybe that's why there's a feeling there might be something missing. The first week of the run saw packed cinemas, but there didn't really seem a lot there for the children in the audience to get their teeth into. A post-credits scene sees a spoof of the old 1960s cartoon title sequence, which was amusing for an FF nerd like myself, but was pretty much lost on 99% of the audience there.
With the box office tailing off quite dramatically, the film is on course to just about make its money back when everything is taken into consideration. That's okay for a Fantastic Four movie in and of itself, considering the brand had taken a large dent in public perception with the unpopular 2015 movie. But as it's supposed to be the first chapter in a new "phase" for Marvel, it's a slightly worrying sign that it's due to showcase bigger things.
Should you see the movie, if you haven't already? Sure. I'm going to watch it again myself.