In the very near future, Marvel’s First Family will finally come home. It is just four months until The Fantastic Four: First Steps debuts — the cul
In the very near future, Marvel’s First Family will finally come home. It is just four months until The Fantastic Four: First Steps debuts — the culmination of a long-held desire of Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige to bring the iconic superhero team into the Marvel Cinematic Universe fold. But in order to realise this future, the film is going back into the past: setting it all in an alternate retro-futurist strand of the multiverse, an alternate mid-20th century where art deco and sci-fi rub shoulders. And, as Empire’s exclusive pics show, before they became the Fantastic Four, the gang — Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) — were simply four extremely clever and capable astronauts, who embarked on a perilous mission into space, and accidentally gained superpowers in the process.
The film, says director Matt Shakman, is looking to evoke the hopeful spirit of the 1950s and 1960s. “This is very much about the spirit of the Space Race,” says Shakman. “It’s about JFK and optimism. It’s imagining these four going into space instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. This idea is that they are the most famous people in America, because they’re adventurers, explorers, astronauts — not because they’re superheroes. And they come back and they’re superheroes on top of it. But primarily they’re astronauts, they’re family.”
Shakman — whose previous credit in the MCU was directing the similarly retro WandaVision — was keen to make the film feel plucked from that time, or at least a fantasy MCU version. “I really wanted to go with as grounded a version of space as possible,” he says. “So, no wormholes. Their tech is very much retro-future, but it’s also booster rockets. It’s a combination of Marvel and Apollo 11.”
That philosophy extended into how the film itself was made. “I really wanted it to feel like it was made in 1965, the way Stanley Kubrick would have made it,” says Shakman. “Within reason.” There is, he says, an emphasis on practical sets and props — the production included a 14-foot-tall spaceship miniature, similar to how Kubrick used miniatures on 2001: A Space Odyssey — and Shakman and his team have “used old lenses, and taken an approach to filmmaking that feels more of the time. Of course, we still have a lot of CG.”
This film, it’s clear, will feel different to other MCU entries. Significantly, it exists separate from everything that we’ve seen in the franchise so far. “We are our own universe,” says Shakman. “Which is wonderful and liberating. 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. Eventually this world will meet up with other worlds — but for now this is our own little corner.”
That eventual meet-up with “other worlds” is, of course, an allusion to the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, the next large Marvel team-up; the studio recently confirmed (via a series of chairs) that the First Family would be making an appearance. The Fantastic Four will, inevitably, be a large part of the MCU’s future — but we have their past to look forward to, first.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps comes to UK cinemas from 25 July
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