After several years of false starts and too many rumored casting decisions to count, Marvel’s first family has finally made its debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper with The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The film is set to have a promising opening weekend and has been met with overwhelming praise already from critics and fans alike.
However, for several years, it looked as though a very different iteration of the Fantastic Four was going to make it to the big screen.
One of the most critically acclaimed superhero films all of all time features the following: a quartet of related superheroes who have to work together to stop an impending threat, a retro-futuristic version of a metropolitan city, the family pondering whether or not a newly born baby will manifest any superpowers in the near future, a climax that’s all about the antagonist attempting to steal said baby, and a musical score that is composed by the renowned Michael Giacchino. If you’ve seen The Fantastic Four: First Steps, all of those elements will sound remarkably familiar to you, and yet, the film in question is actually Brad Bird’s The Incredibles.
The superheroic Pixar film was released all the way back in 2004 and presented an instant problem for live-action comic book films of the time: it was too good. Consider that Bird’s animated film (which took inspiration from comic book classics like Fantastic Four and Watchmen but was entirely an original work) came out one year prior to the Tim Story-directed 20th Century Fox Fantastic Four film, and trumped it in every regard. This was due to the fact that Bird was simply operating on an entirely different level than his live-action peers could match.
The medium of animation afforded Bird and his team at Pixar a far greater suspension of disbelief; if audiences were already investing in the idea that the pixels onscreen were real, living characters, then surely they could stomach a more comic-booky approach to the storytelling, visuals, and aesthetics, right? And indeed, they did.
In the mid-2000s, the most popular comic book movies were still those that adhered to realism, feeling the need to ground their characters’ adventures in a gritty aesthetic. Films like Iron Man or The Dark Knight were massive hits that set precedents for the genre moving forward, and each of them saw their respective filmmakers immersing these larger-than-life characters in worlds that were distinctly recognizable as akin to the audience’s own reality.
But The Incredibles? It thrust audiences of children and adults alike straight into a comic-book world full of superheroes, supervillains, and decades of history from the opening frame. The only sense of realism that Bird and his team were interested in mining was that of the emotional authenticity and interpersonal relationships between the titular characters themselves.
From a tone, narrative, and aesthetic perspective, though, the film was far sillier, pulpier, and more extravagant than any of its live-action counterparts dared to dream. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, audiences bought into the zany world of The Incredibles hook, line, and sinker.
Now, 20 years later, live-action comic book films are finally beginning to catch up. This summer saw the release of both James Gunn’s Superman and Matt Shakman’s Fantastic Four, both of which are films that distinctly set out to embrace a more comic-book-accurate level of lunacy. Both of these films are set in alternative versions of reality, with their own unique histories and status quos.
Because of this, both films are able to embrace their comic book inspirations like few other live-action films have. However, for a period of several years, the MCU’s Fantastic Four film was set to be a far more standard affair.
When Disney bought 20th Century Fox in 2019, Marvel Studios acquired the ability to use various characters that they had not had access to in films for several decades, including the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. While X-Men was deliberately put on the back burner, the studio made it clear that Fantastic Four was a priority. As far back as the 2019 Comic-Con, studio head Kevin Feige was announcing an MCU Fantastic Four movie. But at that time, the film was set to be a modern-day adventure, directed by Spider-Man: Homecoming filmmaker Jon Watts.
In tandem with these official announcements, fan speculation ran rampant at this point, with huge swaths of people sharing their fan art of actor John Krasinski as Mr. Fantastic. Showing that not only were they listening to the fans but also considering it as well, Marvel would go on to cast Krasinski as the character for a cameo appearance in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022. Following the release of the film, things shifted, though. Watts left the project, and Shakman came on board, prioritizing a whole new approach to the movie.
The result was a recast (technically, Krasinski’s version of Mr. Fantastic was from a different universe and also was murdered by Scarlet Witch in his five-minute appearance) and a series of creative principles that pushed the film far closer to a different kind of superhero movie: one that greatly resembled The Incredibles.
After 20 years, the live-action Fantastic Four films were no longer running from comparisons to the animated film, but were instead embracing the fact that The Incredibles nails a great deal of what makes the Fantastic Four so special.
Thus, yes, The Fantastic Four: First Steps does share some uncanny similarities to The Incredibles. But in doing so, it is also far and away the closest a proper adaptation of these characters has ever gotten to feeling genuinely authentic to the source material, and is helping to push the entire comic book movie genre that much more into the realms of pulpy, fantastical storytelling.
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