Kevin Feige Reveals Fantastic Four Story For New Movie
Kevin Feige is playing it close to the chest with Fantastic Four, but he did let something slip about the story.
San Diego Comic-Con came and went this year, dropping a whole bunch of news about upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe projects on its way. One of the more mysterious films announced so far is Fantastic Four, the long-awaited, much-discussed entry of Marvel’s first family into the MCU after years of poorly received Fox movies. While details are still fairly scarce about the movie, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige did give up one big story point to The Hollywood Reporter: the MCU Fantastic Four film will not be an origin story.
That is pretty big news just by itself. For many years, it was pretty accepted common wisdom that a superhero movie must be an origin story on some level. This led to us getting two different Spider-Man origin stories in 2002 and 2012 (courtesy of Sam Raimi and Marc Webb, respectively), a Batman origin story in 1989 and 2005 (Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan), and, of course, a Fantastic Four origin story in 2005 and 2015 (Tim Story and Josh Trank). In recent years, however, the obligatory origin story is being more and more dispensed with.
For example, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe introduced the Tom Holland version of Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, they essentially dismissed an attempt to retell the whole radioactive spider bite thing with Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark waving it aside. Over at Warner Bros, the Matt Reeves version of The Batman took it for granted (correctly) that audiences were already aware that Bruce Wayne’s parents had been killed in Crime Alley. As Kevin Feige said regarding Fantastic Four: “A lot of people know this origin story. A lot of people know the basics. How do we take that and bring something that they’ve never seen before?”
Both the Tim Story and Josh Trank versions of Fantastic Four focused on how the titular group gained their powers through a weird accident; Story’s version went the traditional “cosmic energy” route, while Trank’s involved an exploding interdimensional portal. Both also made longtime Marvel villain Doctor Doom an inherent part of their origin, which makes a lot of sense to the school of storytelling that demands heroes and villains be inextricably linked. But since we have already seen so much of the Fantastic Four getting caught in experiments and receiving their powers, it would actually be much more interesting to them in their typical Marvel Comics role as the preeminent scientific explorers of the universe.
There has been a lot of speculation and fan-casting as to who could play the Fantastic Four (although we can be pretty sure that John Krasinski was one-and-done with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) as well as Victor Von Doom. While there is the possibility that radio personality Howard Stern might actually be playing one of Marvel’s greatest villains, it is still up in the air. For now, we will just have to wait to hear more news about Fantastic Four, who will direct it, and who will star in it. At least we know what it is not going to be.
