Marvel’s first family is at home.
Following their first public appearance together at Marvel Studios’ Comic-Con 2024 panel on Saturday night, Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach spoke exclusively with director Matt Shakman at Entertainment Weekly’s video suite in San Diego about Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Because there have already been several Fantastic Four movies, Shakman told EW that “First Steps” won’t focus on the origins of the team’s superpowers. “One of the things we decided early on was not to do an origin story,” the director said. “Part of the way we make it unique is to not tell the story of them ascending and changing and our story beginning. [there]There’s a lot of familiar story that leads up to that moment, right? And then you’re basically building a new story from the end of the first act, but we thought, ‘Let’s start with a whole new perspective.’ So we’re starting from after that.”
Concept art for “The Fantastic Four.”
Marvel
Moss-Bacharach purposefully avoided the previous film adaptations of the Fantastic Four comics, which were released in 2005, 2007 and 2015.
“I’ve never seen those movies,” he says, “and when I was hired for this job, I didn’t think it would be productive to watch those movies. People ask me, ‘How is this different from other movies?’ and I don’t think it’s useful to make something that’s at odds with something else.”
He continued, “We’re really just making our own thing. This is not to disparage those films, but we’re telling our own very special story. Like any great play, if you make a play with a cast of four people and then you re-perform it with four different casts, it’s the same play but it’s a totally different experience.”
Pascal echoed his co-star’s sentiments: “Our family’s copyrights are what make this experience possible, and everything else is valuable information and inspiration,” he said.
The retro-future 1960s setting was also an intentional departure from previous Final Fantasy films, and it also inspired the film’s new subtitle. “Our film is set in the ’60s, the sort of retro-future ’60s, and it talks a lot about the space race and space voyages,” Shakman said. “So ‘First Step’ is partly tied to that idea of exploration.”
Shakman highlighted how the optimism of space exploration influenced the spirit of the film. “The comic was made in the early ’60s, at the beginning of the space race, so it’s got this idea of looking up at the stars and dreaming about a future where you’re a space tourist,” he said. “So I wanted to take all the great elements of Apollo 11 and imagine Storms and Ben Grimm and Reed Richards heading out into space instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.”
The director also explained how the pre-production footage, which was screened during Marvel’s Hall H panel, was made. “We shot it over a few days in the astronaut prep area, getting ready to go into space,” Shakman said. [the] We shot the dating game Let’s Make a Match, and we shot Reed Richards’ weekly science show for kids. [pre-visualization] And then the animatics that we’ve been creating to design the world.”
The Fantastic Four will also star Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer and Ralph Ineson as Galactus, with Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich and Natasha Lyonne in unannounced roles.
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Marvel Studios also incorporated the Fantastic Four into many of its other promotional efforts over Comic-Con weekend: an F4 actor made a surprise appearance at a screening of Deadpool and Wolverine, a giant version of the team’s logo was created during a drone show, Galactus was teased on Thursday night, and numerous banners featuring retro illustrations of the team were used around San Diego all week to promote the film.
Reporting by Jerrad Hall.