Marvel Watch: Fantastic Four - First Steps (2025)

Watched:  11/07/2025

Format:  Disney+ 

Viewing:  Third

Director:  Matt Shakman

So it was the day after my surgery and I was taking pills that make it so I can't remember proper nouns, which is weird.  Sure, I can remember the dog's name, but if you're like "name the people on Mythbusters" I'm hitting like 3 and 1/2 of them accurately.

But my dad came over to keep an eye on me/ keep me entertained, and I made him watch Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025).  Which, he concluded with "14 year old me liked it a lot", which is I think a great take from a guy pushing 80.     

Anyway, I think we were in agreement that this movie is pretty wild and fun.  

Here's the thing about Fantastic Four: First Steps.  It's way too short.  Should it have been an 8 episode TV show?  I don't know.  Possibly.  Could it have been a 3 hour movie?  You've told Kevin Feige to please stop hurting your bladders, so he obliged.  

So, the movie goes for narrative economy, which sacrificess things we all would have liked.  Could I have watched Ben Grimm and Rachel Rozman pal around for 2 hours?  Yes.  That's a movie.   (Generally dropping Natasha Lyonne into any Marvel movie sounds like a good time to me.)  Would seeing more of the classic Fantastic Four villains gallery have been great?  Absolutely.  Reed open doors to anti-matter dimensions and give Annihilus a bad time?  Show me!  Could I have watched Vanessa Kirby jut sit in a chair and read for two hours while sipping tea?  Yes.   

But we're on a clock here.  I do not have time for that  What I do need is to (a) set up the world from which the Fantastic Four sprung, which is wildly different than the MCU in regards to politics and the potential impact of heroes in that world so when they DO cross over to our more familair MCU (see the end of Thunderbolts*), their expectations are misaligned.  I need to (b) set up Franklin Richards as a cosmic MacGuffin.  And (c) convey that the Fantastic Four is here for all of us in a way that maybe even the Avengers never quite pulled off with all their internal splits and in-fighting.   

It's actually kind of wild that a Fantastic Four movie is as much about the trust in a world in their heroes and what it manages to (almost) accomplish.  They were minutes away from having successfully harnessed the might and brain power of humanity to hurl Earth across the cosmos to save it from Galactus when Shalla-Bol showed up.  Stuff like this used to seem myopic but in 2025 it feels like aspirational science-fiction.

I did enjoy the movie again, maybe more than ever.  I'm not just taking it all in, but getting to listen to what the characters say and take in detail a bit more.  There's some fun retro-futurism going on in this thing I'm still picking up, like robots walking dogs.  I expect in future movies we'll get more of Reed's teased character bit of analyzing things from a cost-benefit stance and on bigger scales.  Probably we'll see more of Johnny and Shalla-bol, and exactly what Franklin means to all of the MCU.