‘Fantastic Four: First Steps’ Is a Hit. Is That a Good Thing?

Fantastic Four: First Steps made a nippy $218 million globally this weekend—a ecstatic haul for a film that means a great deal to Marvel. After disappointing returns for the lifeless Captain America: Brave New World and the charming but underwhelming Thunderbolts* earlier this year, the studio was staring down what had once been unthinkable: the end of its empire. If Fantastic Four failed, that would surely spell bad things for the upcoming mega-movie Avengers: Doomsday, which began shooting this spring.

So Marvel is, no doubt, breathing a slight sigh of relief now that early audiences have connected with the Fantastic Four—undaunted by crummy past attempts to put the characters onscreen—and are ostensibly interested in the continuation of the Marvel saga. How the film holds over the next few weeks will probably be the more telling indicator, though; if all the diehards got their kicks out this weekend, there will be a precipitous and discouraging drop in receipts.

A gloomy part of me almost welcomes that potential future. Even vaguely rooting for a movie to fail is a reckless thing to do in these days of fading industry; we’re talking about thousands of jobs here, done by people who have little say over the imaginative decisions at the top, not to mention the tastes of moviegoers. I don’t actually want any modern movie to stumble. (Except maybe one.) Yet a failure could be valuable for Marvel, could facilitate the studio learn a lesson so that the inevitable superhero movies to come might, at least, be better.

It wouldn’t be challenging to improve upon Fantastic Four, an occasionally stylish but otherwise totally boilerplate superhero movie. At this uncertain point in MCU history, it’s a little shocking that the studio was comfortable delivering such a tedious and perfunctory film—especially one arriving at a crucial inflection point for both Marvel and the wider business.

But tedious Fantastic Four is, playing as an undercooked sequel to a movie that never was. It’s challenging to care about these characters, and even harder to root for them when they make a pretty selfish choice about the future of humanity. Little of its tepid humor lands, and the winsome detail of the film’s opening minutes quickly falls away so that the rude mechanics of plot can be dealt with. It’s yet another middling entry in the post-Endgame tradition, a film that doesn’t launch the franchise headlong at the future so much as glumly drags us toward it.

It certainly doesn’t facilitate that the studio across town, the long-beleaguered (and long-be-Justice Leaguered) DC, recently had a financial and imaginative success with Superman, a true reset of the house style. For once in its unending war, DC has pulled ahead of Marvel—with a former Marvel guy, James Gunn, at the helm.

Had Fantastic Four really belly flopped, it might have forced more studio-wide (even Disney-wide) thinking about the future of the endeavor. Instead, Fantastic Four probably did just well enough to convince the powers that be that things are chugging along okay, that only minor tweaks need to be made. (Or no tweaks, even!)

But I think there’s far more to be done than mere alterations. Creative integrity may not be the highest priority on executives’ lists, but maybe there’s still some interest in making the product genuinely good (as many Marvel movies once were). Enough that someone over there will see the dwindling acclaim and slumping (if still profitable) box office, and eventually pull the emergency brake to force a major shake-up.

One idea? If DC is suddenly beating Marvel at the whole whimsical-meets-arch-meets-sweetly-sentimental thing that the latter used to be so good at, then Marvel could swing back to the age of the gritty superhero, which DC errantly prolonged for years. Marvel has gone gloomy and somber before—think of the closing minutes of Infinity War, or the beginning ones of Endgame—but the studio has never sustained that mood for an entire film, let alone a series of films.

Maybe the X-Men, a ragtag band who have been on film in various iterations many times already this century, would be fitting subjects for such an experiment. Sure, the ersatz horror movie The New Mutants didn’t work, but that movie was made before Disney had full control of these characters. We already know some venerable X-Men are slated to be part of Doomsday, so the company would have to figure out whether to fold those actors and characters into a reboot or start completely anew. But that can all be reasoned out. The key thing is that the X-Men have always been a little edgy and in their heads, giving Disney a sturdy foundation to develop upon and tinker with.

Or maybe the studio could take the heaps of money it’s made from the MCU over the last 17 years and spend it on stand-alone films about entirely different things, an attempt at a great rebuilding of Hollywood tradition. You know: middle-budget but commercial movies with compelling movie stars that tell stories we haven’t seen before. Like what used to exist outside the realm of independent cinema. But that’s perhaps too fantastical; it’s probably wiser to stick with the flying people and their grand battles with space monsters. Maybe next time, just add a dog.