Marvel's Fantastic Four Reboot Doesn't Need to Be an Origin Story

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is continuing to shake up our popular culture, with its ever-evolving tapestry of movies and television shows only growing in the next few years. One of the most highly-anticipated projects in the next few slates of Marvel Studios is Fantastic Four, a new cinematic reboot of Marvel's First Family. Initially announced in late 2020, the project most recently received a 2024 release date, a director in the form of WandaVision's Matt Shakman, and a glut of speculation about who will be playing its central characters. One detail that has also been speculated about is the plot of Fantastic Four itself, after Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said in an interview last month that the film won't be a traditional origin story.

"A lot of people know this origin story," Feige told The Hollywood Reporter. "A lot of people know the basics. How do we take that and bring something that they've never seen before... We've set a very high bar for ourselves with bringing that to the screen."

These comments sent the Marvel fandom into somewhat of a tizzy, especially after the franchise's version of Spider-Man essentially "yada yada"-ed his early days as a superhero (only to go back and explore them, albeit in a different corner of the multiverse, in the upcoming Spider-Man: Freshman Year animated series). While we're still years away from seeing exactly what Marvel's Fantastic Four reboot entails, there's definitely a way for the story to recognize the gravity of the team's origin story — without only being an origin story. 

The Fantastic Four have, to an extent, one of the most ubiquitous inciting incidents in superhero comics — Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Ben Grimm, and Johnny Storm end up on a space flight gone wrong, and accidentally gain superpowers after being exposed to cosmic radiations. Every previous Fantastic Four film series dwelled on that origin in their own way, whether with campy B-movie flair in the unreleased 1994 movie of the 1990s, or with a painfully-gritty seriousness in 2015's Fan4stic. It can be argued that where those movies faltered — even the two Fantastic Four movies of the 2000s, which are arguably the most beloved amongst fans — was in having their entire plots stem from the origin story. To an extent, this started every previous cinematic of the Fantastic Four at "square one", only allowing them to evolve in as much of a traditional hero's journey as a 90-120 minute runtime would allow.

Compare that to the landscape of Fantastic Four comics — which, yes, have rebooted and retold the team's origin story countless times over, but have also used that origin as a jumping-off point for each character to uniquely flourish as a person and a superhero. At the same time, the mythos of Fantastic Four has expanded outward, encompassing supporting characters and other members of the Fantastic family who would never could have been introduced in a truly "square one" story. The previous Fantastic Four movies never got the chance to get to those kinds of adventures, but the post-Endgame MCU, which is already making obscure comic characters into household names and blending decades of comic canon to an impressive detail, definitely can.

Look at the ways that the MCU has portrayed many of its recent "origin stories" — Moon Knight's and Shang-Chi's became a narrative gut punch during the low points of their respective present-day narratives. Meanwhile, the stories of characters like Kate Bishop and She-Hulk essentially opened with their world-shattering inciting incidents, before picking up with them months or years later. It's pretty easy to imagine the Fantastic Four's doomed space flight being handled in a similar way, where it undeniably still matters in the team's story, but it isn't the only story that's being told. (It can also be argued that, given the MCU's penchant for telling stories in different eras, the time between the Fantastic Four's origin and their present day could span decades of franchise canon and lean into the wonder of the 1960s space race, but that's a separate conversation in and of itself.)

Beyond that, when you look at where Fantastic Four falls in Marvel Studios' grand plan, an argument can be made that the film can't even afford to tell a square-one origin story. Kang the Conqueror, whose entire existence directly ties into the failures of the Fantastic Four's legacy, is already a prominent presence in the franchise, Namor is arriving in this year's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and rumors have swirled around Doctor Doom showing up sooner than later as well. With Avengers: Secret Wars currently scheduled for less than a year after Fantastic Four's theatrical debut, it would make little sense for the Fantastic Four to be fledgling heroes in the MCU by the end of their solo film, as opposed to the already-formidable characters they are during the comic event of the same name. Fans have already wanted to see an established Fantastic Four in the MCU for years, as evident by years of theories about them secretly hiding out in the Quantum Realm, and by fans concocting an entire mythos around John Krasinski's very brief alternate version of Reed Richards seen in this year's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

In the time since Fantastic Four movies were first starting to be made, superhero movies have changed the way they bring origin stories to the screen, and some clever subversions of comic canon have occurred as a result. It's pretty easy to picture Marvel's Fantastic Four reboot doing something similar, while still acknowledging how the group got their start.

Fantastic Four is set to be released on November 8, 2024.