Fantastic Four could be the perfect chance to welcome back lapsed Marvel fans like me
Retro, stylish, and hopefully disconnected, Fantastic Four offers the MCU a course correction
I tapped out of the MCU after Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It was all too much: The nonsensical plot, the dim visuals, the unshakeable sense that I was missing whatever that movie was trying to tell me because I didn’t binge every Marvel series. In truth, I watched the first episode of WandaVision and bounced. Black Panther was supposed to be the crème de la crème of the MCU. If they can’t even get these right anymore, what have the others become?
’Tis I, the lapsed Marvel fan, and I’m sure I’m not alone. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, as a franchise, is cold. We could point to the disappointing box office of The Marvels, which, any way you slice it, is dismal. This was the sequel to a movie that made more than a billion dollars. It made less than $200 million. Then there’s the investment in Jonathan Majors, who was to play a Thanos-level villain they would set up over several movies and TV shows. To pull a phrase from a competing and struggling superhero universe, his ouster from the MCU created a crisis on infinite multiverses, particularly the long-awaited team-up Avengers movies, the centerpiece of the whole endeavor. For recovering MCU viewers like myself, the recent turmoil seemingly confirmed my biases. This thing has become too bloated, too confusing, and too samey.
Then, something interesting happened. Earlier today, Marvel released a teaser poster for The Fantastic Four. It is a stylishly retro piece of mid-modern futurism that looks straight out of Disney World’s Tomorrowland, featuring a solid cast of modern stars that audiences have a lot of goodwill toward, plus H.E.R.B.I.E. Is looking at this poster the most fun I’ve had with the MCU since that Shang-Chi bus sequence? Yes. Yes, it is.
The Fantastic Four’s preliminary aesthetic feels like something new for the MCU, especially for fans who have lost track of the multiverses and quantum realms. It offers something many thought impossible: an on-ramp to this bloated and unwieldy universe.
Directed by Matt Shakman, who previously brought Marvel back in time with WandaVision, the movie has a chance to do something few others can: Make a justifiable prequel. Assuming Marvel’s teaser isn’t just a Valentine to people like me who miss turning their brains off for a Marvel adventure once or twice a year, a Silver Age Fantastic Four, set in the 60s and separate from the washed-out aesthetic of Atlanta backlots that poisoned this series, could be the on-ramp we need. This doesn’t even need to be an origin story. Like in Spider-Man: Homecoming, the Fantastic Four could simply already exist in some corner of the MCU that we haven’t seen yet. After all, anyone looking to catch up could always check out the other three Fantastic Four movies or 50 years of comics. Imagine it: a superhero movie connected but not beholden to all that came before, a helpful Rainbow Bridge from the Golden Age of The First Avenger to Iron Man. We don’t need another sequel. We require a reason to come back.
It’s been five years since Avengers: Endgame and 16 years since the MCU began. At this point, Marvel needs to welcome new and lapsed fans, a soft reboot for those who haven’t read every issue. Marvel has stretched itself too thin. It’s clobberin’ time for something a little more solid.