Here is your newer, younger, next-generation Fantastic Four

By Sean O'Neal | February 20, 2014 | 4:36pm

Aux Features Film

After months of looking just about everywhere besides Jessica Alba’s house, Fox has finalized the team for its Josh Trank-directed Fantastic Four reboot. As long expected, Trank’s Chronicle star Michael B. Jordan will play Johnny Storm (a.k.a. The Human Torch), joining Miles Teller’s Reed Richards (a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic) for that awkward moment when your science experiments give you incredible superpowers, making your relationships even more complicated. Rounding out the team is Kate Mara’s Sue Storm (a.k.a. Invisible Girl) and Jamie Bell’s Ben Grimm (a.k.a. The Thing)—with Bell at last fulfilling a career arc that began when audiences saw Bell as the wee, prancing lad of Billy Elliot and said, “Someday he shall make an amazing The Thing.”

Obviously, Fox’s strategy for trying again with the Marvel franchise is to skew younger, more multicultural, and tinier and more British—as has become the norm with long-running comic-book adaptations—with Variety saying the film will be based on the Ultimate Fantastic Four comics that reimagine them as young men and women, when the vigor of youth made them all the more fantastic. Besides, given how long Fox plans to cling to its sole remaining Marvel properties, eventually even the baby-faced Teller will grow those gray temples naturally.