Why Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps Is Set In the ‘60s

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is boldly going where no Fantastic Four movie has gone before: the 1960s. Inspired by the classic Marvel comic books by co-creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, which launched the modern Marvel Universe with Fantastic Four #1 in 1961, the Marvel Studios reboot is set against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world — one where the Future Foundation ushered in a fantastic new era of an alternate-timeline Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“We’re not just doing the ’60s, we’re doing retro-future ’60s,” director Matt Shakman said at Comic-Con 2024. “It’s part what you know from the 1960s, but part what you’ve never seen before.”

RELATED: What Is the Future Foundation? The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Explained

What you have seen before, however, is the origin of the four in 2005’s Fantastic Four and 2015’s Fant4stic. The first Marvel-made FF movie isn’t an origin story, and instead begins with the Fab Four — Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm/Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm/Human Torch (Joseph Quinn), and Ben Grimm/the Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — already fully formed as Marvel’s first family of superhero scientists/explorers/adventurers/imaginauts.

So why the Sixties? While the Space Race and the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union inspired the Fantastic Four’s creation — the irradiated quartet was bombarded by cosmic rays during a premature test flight to beat the USSR to space — the FF is rooted in pure, old-fashioned optimism.

“More than just the visual aesthetics, the ‘60s to me are all about optimism,” Shakman said. “It’s about looking to the stars and dreaming about traveling into space. It’s about how with the right heart and the right mind, you can do anything — which is what the Fantastic Four is all about.”

Although First Steps is the first movie to imagine the Fantastic Four in their native 1960s, the concept predates Marvel Studios. Peyton Reed, who went on to direct the MCU Ant-Man movies, developed a version of the 2005 Fantastic Four film that would have been a period piece when 20th Century Fox still held the rights (which were eventually reacquired by Disney-owned Marvel in 2019).

“I was doing a movie at Fox at the time and they were gonna do Fantastic Four, and I went in and pitched to [then Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO] Tom Rothman,” Reed revealed in 2018. “I developed it for about a year and we went through some different permutations and some different writers, but one of the big ideas was a set-in-the-’60s thing.”

Reed added that his unmade Fantastic Four movie was structurally similar to another movie starring the other Fab Four: 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, the musical comedy that starred the Beatles.

“We were not going to even deal with the origin story,” Reed said. “It was just going to be like you’re in Downtown Manhattan and they’re there. It was a pretty exciting idea. At the time — this was 2002 or ’03 — early on, way pre-MCU, I felt like Fox was not gonna make it.”

According to Reed, it seemed that Fox and producers Constantin Film and 1492 Pictures “wanted to make a B-movie out of it,” so the filmmaker parted ways with the project. The FF eventually made it to screen in the 2005 film from director Tim Story, which was set in the modern day and starred Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, and Michael Chiklis as a group of astronauts who are exposed to cosmic radiation and must band together to use their powers to thwart electrical enemy Doctor Doom (Julian McMahon).

In the new movie, the Fantastic Four “face their most daunting challenge yet,” per the synopsis. “Forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, they must defend Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus and his enigmatic Herald, Silver Surfer. And if Galactus’ plan to devour the entire planet and everyone on it weren’t bad enough, it suddenly gets very personal.”

Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps — starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Natasha Lyonne, Paul Walter Hauser, and John Malkovich, with Julia Garner as Silver Surfer and Ralph Ineson as Galactus — opens in theaters on July 25.