Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s classic Fantastic Four comic run ushered in the Marvel Age of Comics. The co-creators collaborated on over 100 issues between 1961 and 1970, and in that time, birthed everything from Marvel’s First Family — Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Sue Storm/Invisible Girl, Johnny Storm/Human Torch, and Ben Grimm/The Thing — to the Black Panther and Doctor Doom. But it was the Galactus Trilogy, spanning Fantastic Four #48-#50, that can be described as the first Lee-Kirby epic.
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In “The Coming of Galactus,” Lee and Kirby not only introduced the eponymous planet devourer on the final page of Fantastic Four #48, but the Silver Surfer, who heralded the arrival of his master. The Fantastic Four would save the doomed Earth from apocalypse in “If This Be Doomsday!” and “The Startling Saga of the Silver Surfer,” a cosmos-spanning adventure that cemented Fantastic Four as “the world’s greatest comic magazine.”
That’s why The Fantastic Four: First Steps, set in a retro-futuristic 1960s separate from the main Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline, is bringing Lee and Kirby’s larger-than-life character back to screens for the first time since Galactus was depicted as a faceless cosmic cloud in 2007’s Fox-made Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
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“I didn’t want to just use motion-capture for Galactus. I wanted to actually have someone there embodying the part,” director Matt Shakman told Entertainment Weekly about the character played by Game of Thrones and Nosferatu actor Ralph Ineson. “So we’ve built an entire costume for him, and we’ve done a lot of photography testing to figure out, How do you make sure that the scale is correct? How do you film Mount Rushmore?”
It also meant moving away from archvillain Victor von Doom. While Doom wasn’t the first foe the Four faced in the comics — that was the subterranean supervillain the Mole Man — Doctor Doom has been the inaugural villain of every first Fantastic Four movie so far. Joseph Culp played the masked monarch in the Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four (1994), followed by Julian McMahon in Fantastic Four (2005) and Toby Kebbell in Fant4stic (2015).
With Doctor Doom set to make his MCU debut in Avengers: Doomsday (played by former Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr.), the filmmaker was able to focus more on the family.
“Doom’s a great character, but he takes up a lot of air,” Shakman explained. “Other film adaptations have done both an origin story and Doom. We’re doing neither, and that allows us to look at them from a fresh perspective.”
Julia Garner (Wolf Man) will play the herald of Galactus, the silver-skinned rider of the spaceways who wields the Power Cosmic, while Natasha Lyonne (Poker Face), Paul Walter Hauser (Inside Out 2), and John Malkovich (Space Force) have been cast in as-yet-undisclosed roles. Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us), Vanessa Kirby (Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) star in Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which opens in theaters on July 25.
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Image courtesy of Marvel Comics.
