Fantastic Four will stand alone from the rest of the MCU (for now)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps reportedly won't have any "Easter eggs."

By Emma Keates  |  April 4, 2025 | 4:46pm
Screenshot: Marvel Entertainment/YouTube
Film News Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four will stand alone from the rest of the MCU (for now)

Marvel is trying something really retro with The Fantastic Four: First Steps. It’s not just that the film adopts a ’60s-esque “Space Race” aesthetic, although director Matt Shakman did use older lenses and past-era filmmaking techniques because he “wanted it to feel like it was made in 1965, the way… Stanley Kubrick would have made it,” as he told Empire (via TheWrap) in a recent interview. The really nostalgic thing about First Steps is that it’s a standalone movie, without a million Easter eggs or references to other Marvel films to bog it down. Whoever convinced The Powers That Be to make that happen is the real superhero here.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is literally set in its own personal universe, “which is wonderful and liberating,” Shakman said. “There’s really no [other] superheroes. There’s no Easter eggs. There’s no running into Iron Man or whatever. They’re it in this universe. I love the interconnected Marvel Universe, but we get to do something so new and so different.”

First Steps follows the adventures of Marvel’s first-ever superhero team—Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach)—who gained their powers during a dangerous early space flight. While the film still has “a lot of CG” (Moss-Bachrach spends most of it as a rock, so what are you gonna do), Shakman sounds like he’s trying to take the film in a direction the MCU hasn’t really seen before. “This is very much about the spirit of the Space Race. It’s about JFK and optimism. It’s imagining these four going into space instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin,” the director said. “This idea is that they are the most famous people in America because they’re adventurers, explorers, astronauts—not because they’re superheroes.” As such, he describes the film as “a combination of Marvel and Apollo 11,” and promises that there won’t be any “wormholes” in the story.

Though that inspires our own brand of optimism, nothing gold can stay. The film has already been ensnared in some AI-related poster controversy, and Shakman did confirm that “eventually, this world will meet up with other worlds.” We already knew that, as Quinn, Moss-Bachrach, Kirby, and Pascal were all included in the MCU’s interminable Avengers: Doomsday chair announcement last week. For now, though, Fantastic Four is “our own little corner.” 

You can visit when First Steps opens in theaters July 25. Check out the film’s first teaser below: 

 
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