The Fantastic Four is an iconic group of Marvel superheroes that have been one of the many intellectual properties integral to the company’s monumental success. Unfortunately, that success has not made their transition into the silver screen any easier. As of 2025, there have been three official Fantastic Four movies, not including The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which will release this July.
Unlike Iron Man and The Avengers, all the previous Fantastic Four films have struggled to resonate with mainstream audiences for various reasons. However, if you were to ask most fans their reasoning for the movie’s failure, they would say that the film deviated greatly from the source material.
From the Tim Story-directed films in the early 2000s and the Josh Trank 2015 reboot, each adaption attempted to modernize the Fantastic Four to fit their respective decades and lean away from their eccentric elements that define the comics.
Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, The Fantastic Four are a representation of the absurdity of 1960s science fiction and the ever-evolving American family values. They weren’t just your average superhero team but a tight-knit family that, while absurd in many areas, had enough heartwarming and heart wrenching storylines that entranced readers for years, before popular characters like Thor, Iron Man, or even Spider-Man existed.
While interest in these characters hasn’t faded, the failure of its movies has led many people to determine that The Fantastic Four are unadaptable. However, that can’t be further from the truth. In the past few years, Marvel has proven that they can take some of their most obscure characters and turn them into massive successes. Take the Guardians of the Galaxy who, before their film adaptation, only hardcore comic fans fully knew of them.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps looks to be a huge departure from the grounded approach past Fantastic Four films have taken. It leans more into the campiness of its comics but is also not limited to telling another origin story movie.
