Reed Richards' lab is a wonder.The home base for the smartest man in the universe has been built out in real life for the modern Fantastic Four movi
Reed Richards’ lab is a wonder.
The home base for the smartest man in the universe has been built out in real life for the modern Fantastic Four movie and divided into three sections, organized by the primary colors: The red room is for “research,” with tables full of inventions; the yellow room is for “thinking,” and is thus filled with blackboards covered in intricate equations; and the blue room is for “monitoring,” complete with sophisticated screens and communication equipment.
With a setup like this, it’s challenging to imagine a problem that can’t be overcome. “Solve everything” was once Reed’s motto in the pages of Marvel comics, and the character has done his best to fulfill that lofty ambition. And yet, something’s gone horribly wrong.
“Cut the power! Cut the power!” screams Pedro Pascal, in character as Reed, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic, the leader of the Fantastic Four. In response to his desperate order, a blinding lightweight fills the set at Pinewood Studios outside London before cutting out and leaving Pascal’s Reed and his family drenched in darkness.
“People calling, people calling,” says Ebon Moss-Bachrach, sitting at one of the lab’s monitors as Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm, a.k.a. the Thing. Indeed, lights are blinking all over, indicating that whatever’s causing the power outage is also inspiring distress calls from all over the world. For once, the Fantastic Four are at a loss.
“We’re working on a pretty crucial moment, which in script-writing you call the ‘all is lost’ moment,” director Matt Shakman tells Entertainment Weekly on set in September 2024, during a brief break from filming. “The plan that you think is going to work fails, and you have to come up with another plan. The pressure on our heroes is at its highest.”
But if anyone can figure their way out of such a gloomy hour, surely it’s the Fantastic Four.
Reed is brilliant beyond imagination, and Ben is a physical behemoth who will be rendered, when the film is finished, as a gigantic orange rock man. Even in this hour of crisis, they are joined by Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, a.k.a. Human Torch, and Vanessa Kirby as his sister, Sue Storm, a.k.a. Invisible Woman. Together, they are Marvel’s First Family, the group that kicked off the current age of superheroes.
Now, these classic characters are headed back to the gigantic screen to see if they can inspire the same kind of wonder they did when they debuted in the ’60s — and in the process, save not just their fictional world but also the struggling Marvel Cinematic Universe.
To do that, they have to make the future feel modern again. And that means looking backward…
Where Kirby meets Kubrick
Reed, Ben, Johnny, and Sue made their first appearance in The Fantastic Four #1 by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. When that fateful issue first hit newsstands on Aug. 8, 1961, there was no such thing as Marvel Comics. Lee and Kirby worked for the Magazine Management Company, whose publisher, Martin Goodman, wanted to compete with rival DC Comics’ modern Justice League of America series that had become a best-seller by uniting icons including Superman and Batman. So Lee and Kirby made their own superhero team, but with all-new characters who didn’t fit the conventions of the genre.
Gifted with strange powers by a blast of cosmic radiation they experienced on a pioneering spaceship expedition (years before the moon landing), the Fantastic Four were a family instead of a pantheon — they had no secret identities, and weren’t always elated. Ben’s indefinite transformation into the rock-like Thing was a constant source of guilt and shame, while Johnny’s ability to fly and engulf himself in flames only enhanced his youthful moodiness. Reed, the stretchable man, and sometimes see-through Sue also bickered like a real married couple.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, and Joseph Quinn in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’.
Jay Maidment/© MARVEL 2025
The quartet’s relatable humanity was combined with Space Age optimism, embodied by Jack Kirby’s magnificent sci-fi visuals for inventions like the flying Fantasticar and discoveries like the extradimensional Negative Zone.
“The blast of colorful heroics against a murky background world immediately set Fantastic Four apart from everything else on the newsstand,” comics historian (and former EW editor) Sean Howe writes in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
Fantastic Four was so successful with readers that within a year of its first issue, the diminutive comics division at the Magazine Management Company had grown into the bustling Marvel Comics, as other modern creations such as Spider-Man and the Hulk joined the pioneering foursome.
On top of co-creating those other characters, Lee and Kirby continued to collaborate on Fantastic Four for a decade, publishing just over 100 issues that set the template for Marvel superhero comics as we know them. The team faced supervillains including Doctor Doom, met fascinating allies Black Panther and the Inhumans, and saved the Earth from a terrifying space god. Even today, those issues are still crackling with creativity and energy.
Alas, recapturing that magic on the movie screen has proved elusive. There have already been three Fantastic Four movies (four, if we count B-movie king Roger Corman’s unreleased low-budget 1994 ashcan), and none have set the box office on fire. What united them all was an attempt to crowbar these classic characters into a contemporary setting that was inevitably accompanied by cynicism and condescension. The Fantastic Four: First Steps — in theaters July 25 — takes a different approach by returning to the source — not just Lee and Kirby’s stories, but their setting and attitude.
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So the modern film will be set in the ’60s — just not our ’60s. First Steps is the 37th installment in the MCU, but it won’t be set on the same Earth as Iron Man or The Avengers. Instead, the film begins on a parallel world in the Marvel multiverse where history has unfolded differently. In our timeline, the ’50s and ’60s were full of artists and thinkers who imagined utopian futures full of miracle inventions like flying cars and robot friends. In this world, Reed Richards exists to invent them.
Walking through the extensive sets at Pinewood with the film’s costume designer, production designer, producers, and director, one word comes up repeatedly: “Retrofuturism.” The aesthetic watchword for this film meant that, in every respect, the artistic team wanted to combine ’60s period details with sci-fi imagination. To get even more specific, Shakman describes the film’s style as “where Kirby meets Kubrick,” with the original Fantastic Four comics and 2001: A Space Odyssey as the major visual reference points.
“We knew that we’d be on another Earth, so we had a chance to reinvent what the ’60s looked like,” Shakman says. “I was really interested in imagining the Fantastic Four being astronauts. Instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin going to the moon, what if it was Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben who were really the first to go into outer space, the first to push those boundaries?”
Joseph Quinn, Vanessa Kirby, and Pedro Pascal in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’.
Jay Maidment/© MARVEL 2025
Shakman and his team have done their best to make those lofty ideas feel tactile and real. Just a compact walk from the soundstage where the cast was filming that climactic scene is a workshop containing some of Reed’s inventions. The robot H.E.R.B.I.E. (Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics) is an animatronic android that can zip around on wheels by remote control, and there are two different models of the Fantasticar — one with a completely built-out interior for the actors to sit in, and one stripped-down version for the more effects-heavy shots. The Fantasticar is a perfect example of this film’s retrofuturist gestalt of Mad Men-esque period detail and Jetsons-style invention.
“The lines are beautiful and slick, based on mid-’60s American concept cars that were actually referencing European cars, so they have an elegance,” production designer Kasra Farahani tells EW on a tour of the set. “And yet there are these undeniably ’50s-looking retrofuture elements like the turbine intakes at the front and back of the car, and the bubble dome. Even a lot of the interface controls inside are very much based on more of a ’50s look.”
Kirby had a generational imagination, but it was rooted in his upbringing in the Jewish slums of New York’s Lower East Side (where he was born Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917). Just a little farther from the Fantasticar workshop on the Pinewood lot stands a built-out set replicating Ben’s native block of Yancy Street, a fictionalized version of Kirby’s own childhood neighborhood, complete with kosher groceries and a synagogue. There are no futuristic inventions here, but the retro recreations are just as essential to the atmosphere that First Steps is going for.
“Jack Kirby wrote this character [of Ben Grimm] as a bit of an homage to his father, and to the streets that he grew up on,” Moss-Bachrach says. “I’m a New Yorker, and I’ve spent a lot of time on Essex Street, on Delancey, on Clinton. So it does feel like home to me, and the production did a beautiful job recreating that. It was so cool to walk down and see the hat seller and the fish seller. I was shocked that we were outside of London because it fully felt like the Lower East Side.”
Grimm/the Thing is actually the second character Moss-Bachrach has portrayed in the MCU. He previously played Micro, Frank Castle’s “guy in the chair” in The Punisher series. There are a lot of differences between the criminal hacker and the rock-skinned bruiser, but there’s also a particular through-line between the two that Moss-Bachrach treasures.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’.
Jay Maidment/© MARVEL 2025
“I think it’s cool that Micro is named David Lieberman, who takes his last name from Stan Lee,” Moss-Bachrach says. “Then Ben Grimm is this Kirby amalgamation. So, in my brief two portrayals of Marvel characters, I’ve hit the two big guys. It’s a deep honor that I take to heart.”
All in the family
Setting and character go hand-in-hand with the Fantastic Four. As challenging as Shakman and his team worked on building the world of First Steps, they knew it would only work if they also nailed the characters at the center.
In addition to being the first current Marvel superheroes, the Fantastic Four are distinguished from their peers by what makes them a team in the first place. While the Avengers are work friends and the X-Men are students and teachers at a boarding school, the Fantastic Four are a family. Everyone involved knew that capturing that active would be the key to success for this adaptation.
“Casting was the number one challenge for the film,” Shakman says. “It wasn’t just a search for who was the best Ben and who was the best Johnny, but also who was the best family? Who was the best married couple? Who were the best siblings and honorary uncle? So it’s been very gratifying to see the incredible chemistry that the four of them have had since the beginning.”
The stars of First Steps should be familiar faces for fans of prestige TV. Vanessa Kirby made her name on The Crown, while Quinn broke through on season 4 of Stranger Things. Moss-Bachrach has won two Emmys for his performance on The Bear (though some viewers might still know him best as Desi from Girls), and Pascal achieved an incredible run of starring roles on popular genre shows Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, and The Last of Us.
Joseph Quinn and Pedro Pascal in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’.
Jay Maidment/© MARVEL 2025
Marvel isn’t the only studio that’s noticed their talent, and all four recently moved into blockbuster movies. In fact, Pascal and Quinn were filming last year’s Gladiator II when the latter was going through the Human Torch casting process. Quinn leaned on his costar for advice — only for Pascal to soon learn that he too was being sought. By that point, it was starting to feel like destiny.
“It was a big strange thing that I hadn’t planned on happening. It changed the course of my life in a very sudden way, so I really had to process,” Pascal says. “I went on a walk with one of my best friends, and while I was talking about it, this charming little girl very aggressively started to sell me lemonade from a lemonade stand. I was so charmed when I heard this voice saying, ‘What are you doing here?’ I look up, and it’s Matt Shakman. It’s his daughter! Literally the Sunday after he and I had met to talk about the project. And I had literally just been discussing, ‘This is not what I expected to happen, but I think I have to do it.’ Then this happened, and as we walked away with our lemonade, my friend said, ‘I guess you’re doing it!'”
For Moss-Bachrach, getting cast was uncomplicated compared to what it took to bring the Thing to life.
“I’ve never collaborated with so many people — literally hundreds of people, between the animators and the designers. It was a real team effort,” says the actor. “Even though a lot of it is motion-capture and created in animation, all of those costume pieces were built. We always had a suit on set that was the actual proportions so we could see how it would all fit. It was an ongoing and never-ending kind of dialogue between me and the designers and the VFX people. It was a unique experience. I felt like the brain: I would make creative choices, and then we’d circle back, and they’d make it happen. I was deeply, deeply impressed by the seriousness and the dedication that all the designers had to make this man compelling and human and inhuman all at the same time.”
Instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin going
to the moon, what if it was Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben who were really the first to go into outer space,
the first to push those boundaries?”
—Matt Shakman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps director
Moss-Bachrach would do multiple takes with different getups. In the scene EW observed, he did some in a gray motion-capture suit with green dots, and others with different body extensions. In some takes, a stand-in wore a costume built to the Thing’s proportions. This helped all the actors remember how much space the Thing takes up while also allowing them to relate to the man underneath the rock.
“The Fantastic Four are very close. They’re family before they go out to space and get mutated,” Moss-Bachrach says. “So it was helpful that it was just me standing there, because then when Joe or Vanessa or Pedro looked at me, they saw Ben as opposed to the Thing. That’s really valuable in terms of intimacy and the way that we behave with each other.”
Human Torch also required a lot of effects work, though, thankfully, Quinn didn’t actually have to be set on fire…much.
“There is such a thing as too many practical effects,” the actor says with a laugh.
Johnny is Marvel’s archetype of a “hothead” teenager, but what exactly that means has been open to interpretation over the years. In the 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four movies, for instance, Chris Evans played the character as a skirt-chasing scallywag. Quinn wanted to do something different.
“He’s a man that leads with a lot of bravado, which can be an affront sometimes. But also he’s funny,” Quinn says. “Myself and [Marvel Studios boss] Kevin [Feige] were speaking about previous iterations of him and where we are culturally. He was branded as this womanizing, devil-may-care guy, but is that sexy these days? I don’t think so. This version of Johnny is less callous with other people’s feelings, and hopefully there’s a self-awareness about what’s driving that attention-seeking behavior.”
Johnny is the little brother of the Fantastic Four, Quinn notes. But that’s not the only quality that defines him.
Joseph Quinn in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’.
Jay Maidment/© MARVEL 2025
“He is really smart,” Shakman says. “He’s on that spaceship for a reason, and I think sometimes people forget that in various comic stories, he’s been one of the most heroic of them, even if he’s undercutting his heroism at every turn through humor. He’s Sue’s brother, which means they are cut from similar cloth.”
It’s just that Sue — and Reed, for that matter — are gigantic examples for Johnny to live up to.
Cosmic radiation grants Reed the ability to stretch his body in all manner of ways, but his brain is even more impressive. The whole retrofuturist aesthetic of First Steps is made possible by his inventions, and Shakman describes him as “a combination of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Robert Moses.”
Sue has accomplished just as much in the political realm. As head of the Future Foundation (a concept taken from writer Jonathan Hickman’s 21st-century Fantastic Four comics, one of the successor stories that is as beloved by fans as Lee and Kirby’s originals), she has helped achieve global demilitarization and peace. When Shakman and his collaborators say the dreams of the ’60s have been made real in this movie, they don’t just mean rocketships.
“If he is the most scientifically intelligent person, then she is the most emotionally intelligent person on the planet,” Shakman says of Reed and Sue. “Between the two of them, they’re building an idealistic society.”
But as frosty as it is to see these inventions and imagine global peace, a movie about a perfect society would be dull to watch. So, throughout First Steps, a great shadow will fall across this utopia. Remember that “all is lost” moment? If Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben have solved every problem on their Earth, then only something bigger than their planet could scare them that much.
The aged and the modern
Achieving global political peace sounds only slightly harder than synthesizing the decades-long fictional history of Sue Storm. As Marvel’s first female superhero, she been part of the Fantastic Four since its first issue — but back then, she carried the relatively demeaning codename of “Invisible Girl,” could only turn herself hidden, and mostly functioned as a damsel in distress.
“If you played an exact ’60s Sue today, everyone would think she was a bit of a doormat,” Vanessa Kirby says. “So figuring out how to capture the essence of what she represented to each generation, where the gender politics were different, and embody that today, was one of the greatest joys of this.”
Vanessa Kirby in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’.
Jay Maidment/© MARVEL 2025
Over the years, Sue evolved in several ways. Her abilities expanded from individual invisibility to control over electromagnetic lightweight and force fields, making her arguably the team’s most powerful member. At various times, she’s become a mother, a leader, and a skimpily clad dominatrix named Malice. Synthesizing all these aspects into a single character was a lot of fun for Kirby, who says motherhood, in particular, became the key through-line. Indeed, Sue’s pregnancy will play a significant part in the plot of First Steps.
“Matt and I were really aware that there hasn’t really been a mother with a baby in these superhero archetypes women have been getting,” Kirby says. “One of the things I love most from Sue’s history is when she becomes Malice, and all her dark stuff comes out. I was obsessed with that chapter of her life. So I wanted to make sure that there were tones of Malice in there with her, that she wasn’t just the stereotype of a goody, sweet mother.”
Kirby continues, “I’ve always been really interested in the mess of femininity, and how can you be both? How can you be all the things? Not just the tough, invincible, powerful woman, but also a mother who gives birth, which is itself a superhero act. I love that these characters are real humans in a messy family who argue and try to work it out and get things wrong.”
Although Marvel is reluctant to confirm the identity of Sue’s First Steps child, the comics canon provides two possibilities: a son named Franklin Richards and a daughter named Valeria Richards. Franklin’s mutant abilities are beyond even the most powerful X-Men, while Valeria has an intelligence that could even surpass her father’s. As a result, the cosmic beings of the Marvel Universe make a point of keeping tabs on both of them. Franklin, in particular, has long been a subject of fascination for Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds, who does indeed come calling in First Steps.
Reed has figured out space travel, and invented robots and flying cars. But how much of that will facilitate when a massive space god comes to eat the Earth?
“It is definitely a scale of threat which Reed has never experienced,” Pascal says. “Even the smartest man in the world is awestruck by a being that outdates his understanding of time.”
Pedro Pascal in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’.
Jay Maidment/© MARVEL 2025
Galactus was introduced in a two-part comic story by Lee and Kirby that remains the high point of their collaboration. But when he was brought to the screen in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Galactus was rendered as a faceless space cloud — a rejection of the comics’ colorful origins. In First Steps, Galactus will be portrayed by actor Ralph Ineson (Nosferatu), wearing actual purple-and-blue armor; the costume workshop on set is full of various attempts at making his signature look work.
“I didn’t want to just use motion-capture for Galactus. I wanted to actually have someone there embodying the part,” Shakman says. “So we’ve built an entire costume for him, and we’ve done a lot of photography testing to figure out, How do you make sure that the scale is correct? How do you film Mount Rushmore?”
Positioning Galactus as the antagonist also distinguishes First Steps since previous Fantastic Four movies all started with Doctor Doom. It’s an understandable impulse, since Doom is perhaps the most iconic supervillain of all time — but Marvel’s upcoming plans for Robert Downey Jr. as the character freed Shakman to try something else. (After EW conducted interviews for this story, Marvel Studios announced that Pascal, Kirby, Quinn, and Moss-Bachrach will all reprise their roles opposite Downey’s Doom in 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday.)
“Doom’s a great character, but he takes up a lot of air,” the director says. “Other film adaptations have done both an origin story and Doom. We’re doing neither, and that allows us to look at them from a fresh perspective.”
‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ director Matt Shakman in EW’s San Diego 2024 Comic-Con studio.
Max Montgomery
If all this works, then the cast and crew will have accomplished something that no one else has before: making the Fantastic Four into a major movie franchise. That might be a high order for year 18 and movie 37 of the MCU, but crazier things have happened. Shakman made the MCU viable on TV by directing WandaVision, and Pascal has already elevated multiple other franchises.
“It was really intimidating,” Pascal says about living up to Reed Richards. “I relied on the people that I was around to hold me to the experience and help get me through it. Stepping into something like Game of Thrones and then going into the early days of Netflix with Narcos and then Star Wars and the world of video games with The Last of Us, each time I’ve felt like I couldn’t top how intimidating the last one was. They’re all scary because you really want to make people happy, especially if it’s something that’s widely known with particular expectations around it because you want those expectations to be met. You also want to be authentic to yourself so that it can be the best that it can be for anybody who wants to be entertained by a story and travel with us into this world.”
Even if they can’t solve everything, it’s worth a try.
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