Fantastic Four’s Jessica Alba Offers Advice for Vanessa Kirby Taking on Sue Storm Role

Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps is currently filming in the UK, and now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe reboot of The Fantastic Four is officially a real thing, it’s interesting to hear from some of the veterans of the franchise. Actress Jessica Alba starred in The Fantastic Four (2005) and its sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) as Sue Storm, aka The Invisible Woman. In a new interview for her new Roku series Honest Renovations, Alba was kind enough to pass on some advice to actress Vanessa Kirby, who is the new MCU version of Sue Storm. 

When asked what Kirby needs to know about stepping into the world of The Fantastic Four (and Marvel fandom), Alba had this to say: 

“I think just have fun. The fans are so amazing. It was probably one of the best times of my life, going around the world and meeting all of the people that just love The Fantastic Four and love these comic books and can relate to these stories, Alba shared with Collider. “That, to me, and to be able to meet so many different people that you can touch and bring joy to them, I would say that’s first and foremost for anyone who gets the honor of playing one of these awesome characters. So I’d tell her to just have fun and soak in the moments.”

Tim Story’s Fantastic Four movies of the 2000s are now looked at as early pioneers of the blockbuster era of superhero movies, following the release of Wesley Snipes’ Blade, X-Men (2000), and the game-changing first Spider-Man (2002) movie. 20th Century Fox was hoping the Fantastic Four would be a strong enough IP to support its own franchise universe, alongside the X-Men films (the only two Marvel movie properties Fox owned). Instead, director Tim Story (Barbershop) never quite achieved the massive breakthrough success of Spider-Man or X-Men with both of his F4 films; the property sat dormant for years as Fox continued building out the X-Men movie universe, and eventually gave it a soft-reboot with X-Men: First Class in 2011. The studio tried to do the same with Fantastic Four, tapping filmmaker Josh Trank (Chronicle) to do a full-fledged reboot (Fant4stic)  which crashed and burned, earning just $167 million at the box office on a budget of $120. 

Even worse than the loss of profits were the embarrassing stories of the film’s production. It has been rumored that Trank and Fox had major conflicts during the making of the film, with conflicting reports indicating that Trank was “erratic” on set, while others claim his original cut of the film was too dark for the Fox executives, leading to an infamous series of reshoots that changed the movie’s latter half completely and resulted in a final cut that was a Frankenstein mess of mismatched ideas, tones, and style. The reboot was received so poorly that Fantastic Four has remained dormant in the decade since – despite the global domination of the Marvel Studios brand. 

So, while Alba’s words to Kirby are nice, her experience doing the film (which wasn’t without its own casting controversy) and meeting the fans was probably a lot different than the ugly legacy Vanessa Kirby and co. have to now overcome.

Fantastic Four: First Steps has a release date of July 25, 2025.