The Fantastic Four:
First Steps
IMDb Rating
128K+
IMDb Votes
83%
Rotten Tomatoes
$858M
Box Office
Synopsis & Review
Directed by Matt Shakman — whose work on WandaVision demonstrated a rare ability to blend tonal complexity with genuine emotional warmth — The Fantastic Four: First Steps makes the most consequential creative choice available to it immediately and commits to it fully: the film is set not in the contemporary Marvel Cinematic Universe but in an alternate 1960s-inflected retro-futurist world, a universe where the space age never ended and the optimism of postwar modernism was never punctured by the cynicism that followed. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), the world's most brilliant scientist, lives in this version of New York with his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), and their closest friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — all of whom were irradiated by cosmic rays during a deep-space mission and returned with extraordinary abilities. Reed stretches. Sue turns invisible and generates force fields of tremendous power. Johnny ignites into living flame. Ben became something else entirely — a creature of orange rock, immeasurably strong, who chose the name the Thing and has spent years coming to terms with what that choice means. When Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds — an entity of incomprehensible scale and age, accompanied by his herald the Silver Surfer — arrives in Earth's orbit and announces his intention to consume the planet, the four of them must find a way to stop something that has never been stopped before.
Marvel Studios has attempted to bring the Fantastic Four to the screen three times before this film — twice at Fox and once in a disastrous 2015 reboot — and each previous attempt foundered on the same fundamental misunderstanding: treating the characters as a standard superhero team rather than as what they actually are in the comics, which is a family. Shakman and his writers understand this completely. The film's emotional architecture is entirely domestic: the tensions between Reed's intellectual obsession and his obligations as a husband and father-to-be (Sue is pregnant throughout the film, which the screenplay uses to devastating dramatic effect), the complicated brotherhood between Johnny and Ben, the specific loneliness of being a man who can no longer touch anything without destroying it. The Galactus threat is enormous in scale and visually overwhelming — the design of the Devourer, realised at a size that makes him a feature of the skyline rather than a character in the conventional sense, is the most genuinely alien visual Marvel has produced — but it is always in service of the family story rather than a replacement for it. Pascal, Kirby, Quinn, and Moss-Bachrach have a chemistry so natural and so specific that it is difficult to imagine the film working with any other configuration. This is the Fantastic Four that the comics have deserved on screen for sixty years.
Why Watch This Movie?
A Visual World Unlike Anything in the MCU
The retro-futurist 1960s setting is not merely an aesthetic choice — it is a complete tonal and philosophical departure from the contemporary grounding of the wider MCU. Production designer Claude Paré constructed a version of New York that combines mid-century modernist architecture with space-age technology: monorail systems, vacuum tube computing, rocket-finned automobiles, and the kind of optimistic futurism that believed the moon landing was just the beginning. The Baxter Building — the Fantastic Four's home and headquarters — is a marvel of design in both senses: a soaring glass-and-steel tower that feels simultaneously period-appropriate and genuinely visionary. Every frame of the film looks like a love letter to the era of its setting.
Galactus as the MCU's Most Imposing Threat
The MCU's track record with cosmic-scale villains has been inconsistent — Thanos remains the gold standard, and much of what followed him felt diminished by comparison. Galactus corrects this. Rendered at a scale that the film commits to without qualification — he is literally as tall as skyscrapers, his presence in Earth's atmosphere causes tidal shifts and atmospheric distortion — the Devourer is terrifying precisely because the Fantastic Four cannot fight him in any conventional sense. The film's central dramatic question is not whether our heroes can punch hard enough to win, but whether they can find a different kind of answer. Julia Garner's Silver Surfer — Galactus's herald and the film's most surprising emotional register — provides the key.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach's Ben Grimm Is a Career Performance
The Thing is the hardest member of the Fantastic Four to realise on screen — a man permanently encased in a rock-like exterior who must communicate warmth, humour, grief, and love entirely through performance under heavy prosthetics and digital finishing. Moss-Bachrach, best known for his Emmy-winning work in The Bear, delivers a performance of extraordinary physical and emotional specificity. His Ben Grimm is funny in exactly the right register, heartbreaking when the film requires it, and the character's relationship with Alicia Masters (Paul Walter Hauser in an unexpectedly moving performance) is the film's quietest and most affecting subplot. The moment he says the line — you will know which one — is the finest individual moment in any MCU film since Tony Stark's snap.
Cast & Crew
Director
Matt Shakman
Screenplay
Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan & Ian Springer
Studio
Marvel Studios
Reed Richards
Pedro Pascal
Sue Storm
Vanessa Kirby
Johnny Storm
Joseph Quinn
Ben Grimm / The Thing
Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Silver Surfer
Julia Garner
Original Score
Michael Giacchino
Official Trailer
© Marvel Studios / Walt Disney Pictures. Trailer embedded via YouTube.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is First Steps set in the main MCU timeline?
The film is set in an alternate universe within the Marvel multiverse — not in the primary MCU Earth (Earth-616) but in a separate reality with its own distinct history. This is established explicitly in the film's opening act and allows the creative team to tell the Fantastic Four's origin story in an untouched environment without the complication of explaining why the world's most prominent super-team has never appeared in twenty-seven previous MCU films. The connection to the wider MCU is made clear by the film's mid-credits scene, which sets up the team's eventual transition into the primary MCU timeline in a future film. No prior MCU knowledge is required to enjoy First Steps, though familiarity with the multiverse concept introduced in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will enrich the post-credits context.
Why is the Silver Surfer played by a woman in this version?
The Silver Surfer in First Steps is Shalla-Bal — a character who exists in the original Marvel Comics as Norrin Radd's (the classic Silver Surfer's) love interest and who becomes the Silver Surfer herself in certain alternate-universe comic runs. The film uses the alternate-universe setting to introduce Shalla-Bal as the herald in this particular reality, played by Julia Garner with a haunting, otherworldly quality that gives the character tremendous screen presence. The choice also serves the film's emotional architecture: Shalla-Bal's relationship with Galactus and her conflicted loyalty between her master and the planet she is asked to condemn maps onto the film's central themes of obligation, sacrifice, and the limits of duty. Marvel has confirmed that Norrin Radd exists elsewhere in the multiverse.
Does the film require knowledge of previous MCU films to enjoy?
No — and this is a deliberate and celebrated creative decision. The alternate-universe setting means that First Steps functions as a completely self-contained film. The Fantastic Four's powers are established through the film's narrative without requiring the audience to have seen any prior MCU entry. There are no mandatory connections to Iron Man, Captain America, or the Infinity Saga. The film tells a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end that works independently. Dedicated MCU fans will find a mid-credits and post-credits sequence that places the film in a larger context, but these scenes are supplementary to the primary experience rather than required for its enjoyment.
How does First Steps compare to previous Fantastic Four films?
The previous theatrical Fantastic Four adaptations are Fantastic Four (2005) and its sequel Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and the critically derided reboot Fantastic Four (2015). None of the three was able to reconcile the characters' fundamentally domestic, family-centred emotional reality with the demands of superhero spectacle filmmaking. First Steps succeeds where they failed by treating the family dynamic as the film's primary genre rather than its subplot. The result is categorically superior to all three previous attempts — not merely by degree but by kind. The 2025 film has been received as definitively the version the characters deserved, and the critical and commercial evidence strongly supports that assessment.
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