Marvel’s First Family
The Fantastic Four came first. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created them in 1961, before Spider-Man, the X-Men or the Avengers, and their comic’s success launched the entire Marvel universe. Reed Richards, the brilliant scientist. Sue Storm, his wife, who can turn invisible.
Johnny, her hot-headed brother, the Human Torch. And Ben Grimm, Reed’s best friend, turned into a rock-skinned monster called the Thing.
On paper, they should have been the easiest team in all of comics to put on screen: a family, with a clear dynamic, iconic powers and some of the greatest villains Marvel ever created. Instead, for three decades, every attempt failed, and the property got a reputation in Hollywood as cursed.
The Fantastic Four should be the easiest thing in comics to get right, and the fact that studio after studio got it wrong is embarrassing. The cloud Galactus in 2007 was a gutless call. A helmeted giant who eats planets was sitting right there in the comics, and somebody decided audiences couldn’t handle him.
The Film Nobody Saw
The first attempt was made in 1992 and 1993 by Roger Corman’s company, on a budget of around a million dollars. The German company that held the rights reportedly needed to start production by a deadline or lose them. The finished film was never officially released.
Whether anybody ever intended it to come out is still disputed. The cast and crew believed they were making a real movie and promoted it at conventions.
Then it vanished, and it circulated for years only as a bootleg. Its effects are cheap, its costumes look homemade and it’s more curiosity than film, but it’s oddly sincere. The people in it clearly loved the characters, and you can feel it in every cheap frame.
The 2005 Film and Its Sequel
The first released version came in 2005, directed by Tim Story, with Ioan Gruffudd as Reed, Jessica Alba as Sue, Chris Evans as Johnny and Michael Chiklis as Ben. It made money, and it’s not a disaster, but it’s flat, bright and forgettable, a family comedy with superpowers and a bland Doctor Doom.
Chiklis was good as the Thing, in a heavy prosthetic suit, and Evans was fun as Johnny, years before he became Captain America. But the film never found the sense of wonder that made the comics special. It felt like a sitcom, pleasant and disposable, the kind of thing you forget on the drive home.
The 2007 sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer, introduced the Surfer and the great planet-eater Galactus, and then turned Galactus into a giant cosmic cloud.
Fans have never forgiven it. It’s the moment the series lost what little credibility it had. Fox shelved plans for a Silver Surfer spin-off and let the franchise go quiet for eight years.
The 2015 Reboot
Fox tried again in 2015, with a darker, grittier reboot directed by Josh Trank, who’d made the found-footage superhero film Chronicle. The cast was strong: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell. The production was reportedly a mess, with reshoots, studio interference and a director and studio at war.
The result was a joyless, murky, underlit film that spent most of its running time on an origin story and then rushed through a shapeless climax. The night before release, Trank tweeted that he’d had a much better version of the film that audiences would never see. It flopped badly, critics savaged it and it’s now among the most notorious superhero failures ever made.
Why They Kept Failing
Look at the four failures together and a pattern appears. Every version tried to make the Fantastic Four fit its own moment. The 2005 film made them a bright, jokey family comedy. The 2015 film made them brooding, damaged young people in a grim world, like every other superhero film of its era. Neither version understood what the characters are.
Gritty is wrong for the Fantastic Four, and so is sitcom.
They’re a family of explorers, born out of the optimism of the early sixties, the space race and the idea that science would take humanity to the stars. Their stories are about wonder, discovery and a family that argues and loves and saves the world together, usually before dinner. Take that away and you’re left with four people with powers, and there are plenty of those already.
I think this is the whole diagnosis, and it’s why the 2015 film fails worse than the 2005 one. The 2005 version was shallow, but it at least liked these people. Trank’s film looks embarrassed to be a superhero movie, and wasting Teller, Mara, Jordan and Bell on that much gloom feels close to criminal.
For Writers
Every failed Fantastic Four film tried to make the characters fit its own era. None of them understood what the characters were originally about.
Adapting any story, from a comic to an old novel to a real life, means deciding what must stay and what can change. The mistake is changing the core of the material to suit the fashions of the moment. Before you adapt anything, write down in one sentence what the original is really about. For the Fantastic Four, it’s a family exploring a world full of wonder. Everything else can change. That sentence can’t. Every failed version broke it, and the one that worked kept it.
What First Steps Got Right
Matt Shakman finally got it in 2025 with The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The biggest decision was the setting.
The film takes place on an alternate Earth that looks like the sixties imagined the future: retro-futurist cities, rocket ships with big analogue dials, flying cars, midcentury furniture. The Fantastic Four are world-famous heroes in a world that still believes in progress.
That setting solves everything. It lets the film be optimistic without seeming naive. It gives the characters a world that matches their origins. And it makes the film look like nothing else in the MCU. I gave it a 7, and I’d argue it’s the most distinctive Marvel film in years.
For Writers
First Steps set the Fantastic Four in a retro-futurist sixties world that matched the optimism of the era that created them, and suddenly everything about them made sense.
Setting is more than decoration. The right world can make characters make sense, supporting their values, explaining their behavior and giving them room to be themselves. The wrong one fights them at every turn, and the reader feels the friction without knowing where it comes from.
If your characters feel off in their world, the problem may be the world. Try changing the setting before you change the people, and see whether they suddenly come alive. First Steps didn’t rewrite the family. It gave them the right world.
The Family Is the Story
The second big decision was putting the family at the center of the plot. Sue is pregnant, and Galactus, the planet-eater, arrives and offers to spare the Earth if they give him their unborn son. The whole film turns on that choice, and on a family refusing to make it.
Pedro Pascal’s Reed is clever and anxious, Vanessa Kirby’s Sue is the team’s real strength, Joseph Quinn’s Johnny is cocky and warm, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben is gentle and wry. For the first time on screen, they feel like a family, bickering and protective and loving, and their bond drives the story.
Galactus at Last
The third decision was simple: show Galactus properly. Ralph Ineson plays him as the towering, helmeted giant Jack Kirby drew in 1966, vast enough to dwarf cities, with a deep, calm voice that makes him feel like a force of nature. After the cloud in 2007, just seeing him on screen felt like an apology.
Ineson’s Galactus is the image that convinced me. He’s huge and calm and looks like Kirby’s drawing come to life, and I’d put his first appearance up against anything the MCU has put on screen. That scene is a big part of why I gave it a 7. Julia Garner plays the Silver Surfer, his herald, and Michael Giacchino’s score gives the whole film a soaring, old-fashioned sense of adventure. For once, a Fantastic Four film felt as big as the comics.
The Rights Tangle
Part of the curse was simple ownership. For years, the Fantastic Four’s film rights sat with Fox instead of Marvel. That’s why the 2005, 2007 and 2015 films were made outside the MCU. Fox had every incentive to keep making films to hold on to the rights, and less incentive to make them well.
That changed when Disney bought most of Fox in 2019, bringing the Fantastic Four home to Marvel Studios. It took six more years to get them on screen, but for the first time, the people making the film owned the whole Marvel toybox, and could give the family the world and the villains they deserved.
Doom, Still Waiting
The other long-running failure is Doctor Doom, among the greatest villains in comics: a genius, a king and a man convinced he’s the only one who can save the world. Julian McMahon played him in 2005 as a corporate schemer, and Toby Kebbell’s 2015 version was a glowing blob in a cloak. Neither came close.
Wisely, First Steps kept Doom mostly off screen and saved him for later, and Marvel has cast Robert Downey Jr. in the role for the next Avengers film. It’s a bold choice, and it’ll be the true test of whether Marvel understands the Fantastic Four’s world. A great Doom would finish the job First Steps started.
The Thing
If any character has come close in every version, it’s Ben Grimm. The Thing is the soul of the Fantastic Four, a gruff, sad, funny man trapped in a body he hates, and even the weakest films found something touching in him. Michael Chiklis, sweating inside a heavy rubber suit in 2005, gave him real warmth.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s version in First Steps is the best yet: quiet, kind and a little melancholy, a man who’s made his peace with his rocky skin and still carries the loss of the life he had. He’s the character audiences respond to most, and the film gives him space to breathe.
A Director’s Film
It also felt like it had a director. Shakman, who’d made WandaVision, gave it a distinct look, pace and tone, and the studio let him. It’s the kind of director-driven approach I argued for in Why the 2000s Superhero Films Were Better Than the MCU, and it made all the difference.
The film isn’t perfect. The pacing sags in places, the villain is more spectacle than character and it leans on the audience’s goodwill. But it understood the Fantastic Four in a way no previous version did, and after thirty years, that’s worth celebrating.
Craft Note
Craft Note
That Fantastic Four curse came from adaptations that tried to force the characters into the fashions of their moment, when their appeal was always a family’s sense of wonder.
The heart of a story survives changes in costume, setting and era. What it can’t survive is a change to its heart.
When you adapt or revise, protect the one thing that makes the story what it is, and feel free to change everything else.
The Curse Is Broken
For thirty years, Hollywood failed with the Fantastic Four because it kept trying to turn them into a sitcom, a grim reboot or a cheap rights grab. First Steps finally let them be a family of explorers in a world that believes in the future, and it worked. I gave it a 7 because the sagging pacing and a villain who’s more spectacle than character hold it back. I’m still thrilled it exists, and I want Marvel to handle Doom as carefully as it handled Galactus.
