Kevin Feige confirms a key theory about Fantastic Four

According to Kevin Feige on The Official Marvel Podcast, The Fantastic Four—starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach—begins shooting at the end of July, the day after San Diego Comic-Con. This marks a big move for the studio, introducing some of the comics’ most iconic and enduring characters into the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe. But as many fans suspected, when we first meet this iteration of the Fantastic Four, it won’t exactly be part of the MCU as we’ve come to know it.

“So it is a period piece,” Feige confirmed on the podcast (via GamesRadar). “There was another piece of art we released with Johnny Storm flying in the air and making a four symbol, and there was a cityscape in the corner of that image. And there were a lot of smart people who noticed that that cityscape didn’t look exactly like the New York that we know, or the New York that existed in the ’60s in our world. Those are some smart, smart observations.”

In other words: not only is F4 set in the past, it’s set in an alternate universe. Of course, that’s the only way an F4 set in the past could work in the context of the MCU. We’ve seen a lot of the Marvel timeline (from Captain America: The First Avenger to Hank Pym’s backstory in Ant-Man to the time-hopping in Avengers: Endgame), and no one has ever mentioned an eclectic group of scientist-heroes who were active in the 1960s. Rather than shoehorning them into that timeline somehow, Marvel gives itself a lot more freedom by giving the team its own universe.

There are practical advantages to setting this film in an alternate universe. For those of us feeling bogged down by MCU lore, Fantastic Four will be refreshingly, entirely its own thing. Without having to explain how the team fits into or is connected with the rest of the MCU, Marvel has the option of skipping yet another F4 origin story and bringing us right into a world where Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm are already Earth’s mightiest heroes. Because the MCU has already established the multiverse and the ways an entity might traverse it, the door is open for the team to interact with the Avengers (whomever that might be now…) but also exist independently of them.

All in all, this seems like the best option to make the Fantastic Four successful in their own right and to allow the MCU to break its own mold a little bit and create something that has the potential to be fresh and interesting. “I’m extremely excited by it because I think those characters are mainstays, are legendary pillars of the Marvel Universe that we’ve never gotten to play with or explore in a significant way outside of Doctor Strange: Multiverse Of Madness and a few fun teases before, in the way that we’re doing it in that film,” Feige said. “So I’m extremely excited for that.”