The Four Fantastic Four Movies So Far…And Thoughts About the Fifth

There are four Fantastic Four movies so far: a 1994 movie called The Fantastic Four which was unreleased but is on You Tube; the 2007 movie Fantastic Four and its 2009 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer; and the 2015 reboot, also called Fantastic Four. The movie coming out on July 25—they seem to wait 10 years between every reboot!—will be The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

The existing FF movies have poor reputations among fans, but are those reputations deserved? I will look at each movie, give a general review, and also compare and contrast the significant characteristics that run across them in a chart at the end.

I should start by saying that the Fantastic Four is an unusual property at Marvel Comics. It is of course the first comic series in the modern era of Marvel, the comic that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby used to launch their whole new approach to superhero comics, one that broke from the past in ways that are hard to imagine from today’s perch, utilizing the “Marvel Method” of writing and taking a more informal, everyday perspective into heroes’ lives. The approach used in the FF was the seed that led first to Ant-Man in Tales to Astonish, then the Incredible Hulk, then Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy and Thor in Journey into Mystery, then Iron Man in Tales of Suspense, Dr. Strange in Strange Tales, the X-Men and the Avengers, and finally Daredevil. Those properties have all launched successful live action shows or movies and are largely well-known to the general public. And yet out of all those comic series, it was the Fantastic Four that for years carried the masthead of “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.”

But the FF lost prominence compared to Avengers and eventually X-Men as the pre-eminent Marvel team books. Yes, there are classic Fantastic Four stories that everyone would count among the greats of superhero comics, such as the coming of Galactus. Their primary foe, Doctor Doom, is possibly Marvel’s most well-known villain. Everybody knows “Flame On!” and “It’s Clobberin’ Time!”

But the FF are rarely at the top of what comics nerds are talking about these days. Hiring Ryan North as their writer was a good strategy to generate a fresh take on the First Family. But even with that, I imagine that the percentage of Viners who read Fantastic Four on a monthly basis, or who have a significant stash of their back issues, is not high.

Now I am a Fantastic Four comics fan. Some of my favorite eras are the Lee/Kirby days, the Walter Simonson run, the Mark Waid run, the Mark Millar and Jonathan Hickman era (I tend to see them as connected through their darker take on their world), the Matt Fraction Future Foundation, and the current North run. I’ve got a lot of FF comics and have some strong FF opinions, although my interest has certain waned and waxed over the years depending on the creative team. So I’d like the new movie to be a success both creatively and financially, so that the First Family can fully join the MCU.

Which brought me to rewatch the old movies and then to write this, because even with their relatively poor public performance, I’m sure a lot more people have seen the movies than have read the comics, and putting them in perspective 10 (or 20 or 31) years later might help prep us for their First (or Fifth) Steps.

1994’s The Fantastic Four

This movie is available in full on YouTube. I won’t link to it just in case Marvel is out there trying to delete links--the one I watched last week is already no longer on YouTube. But as of today, there is another version of it on YouTube that you can find with enough digging.

This movie has an absolutely atrocious reputation. I never watched it until recently, partly due to its reputation and partly because I figured it would be harder to find. Nope. It’s right there in full.

So, is its reputation deserved? Yeah, it definitely is. The acting is terrible, the writing is terrible, the special effects are terrible. It’s a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of movie. Which makes sense, since Robert Corman was involved.

This movie was seemingly made just so Bernd Eichinger could keep the movie rights to it, which worked; he was also connected to the 2005 movies. You can read about that in more depth than I feel the need to go into on the Wikipedia page.

I’ve seen this movie compared to a soap opera, in terms of its level of production design. That’s true, but what it really made me think of was ‘80s Doctor Who. They were shoveling out new episodes of Doctor Who on a weekly basis or so, so the effects were super cheap—but also totally fun. They were innocent, they were honest, nobody was fooled but it was a good time. This FF movie looks like those shows but it’s not a good time. It lacks the enthusiasm, the joy. The attitude is more like a ‘90s Skinemax softcore movie—cynical but determined to give the audience what it promised whether they like it or not. The only question here is, what is it promising to give? Well, a crappy movie that’s hard to even hate-watch. It’s not really for Fantastic Four fans, because it changes so much, and does such a bad job with it, but it does throw out a bone or two. I can imagine maybe watching it again if I was with a bunch of friends and we were all really drunk. That’s about it.

The plot: Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom are in college. A comet called The Colossus is going to come by. They work together on a machine connected to it but Doom is seemingly killed in an accident. In this same time frame, we meet Ben, Reed’s jock friend, and a young-teen Sue and her kid brother Johnny; their mom owns Reed’s boardinghouse. Years later, when the Colossus swings around again, Reed makes a ship to go out to it and brings along Ben, plus the no-longer-creepily-young Sue and Johnny for basically no reason. (Which is the same situation as in the comics; it makes no sense for Sue and Johnny to be there.) There’s another accident, because a part of their tech got switched out by a guy called the Jeweler, who’s essentially the Mole Man. They get their powers. Ben meets Alicia Masters but the Jeweler kidnaps her. Doom shows up and wants to wreak some havok. The FF band together and stop them both.

There are a bunch of things in here that I’ll follow up with below in more detail in the compare and contrast section.

How is the movie? Again, it truly is as bad as they say. You can watch just the first few minutes, a scene where a professor explains the Colossus to Reed and Victor, to see if you want to just punch through your screen in frustration at the ridiculous, over the top acting, or if you’re willing to watch it ironically. I truly can’t believe that the version of this scene in the movie is the take they thought they should go with. It simply can’t be that they compared this one with some others and thought, “this one is the best.” I have to imagine they literally just didn’t do second takes. The whole movie is like that. But, The Fantastic Four does get points for having the most accurate on-screen portrayal of Doctor Doom’s armor so far. He looks pretty much straight out of the comics, very much unlike some of what we’ll see from the later movies. Doom’s armor at the end of Rise of the Silver Surfer came close, but the YouTube movie is straight-up Kirby style—it’s not well-made, but it’s the classic design.

2005’s Fantastic Four

The first “real” FF movie. It made about $334 million and has a 45% Popcornmeter from Rotten Tomatoes. It was directed by Tim Story, one of the few Black directors of a major comic movie.

Symposis: Reed and Ben are friends. Reed is a successful scientist but a failed businessman, and has to ask Victor, who is successful at both, to finance his new project studying cosmic energy. Sue works for Doom as a scientist and administrator in his company; she was Reed’s girlfriend back in the day. Doom agrees to pay for the project and Sue hires Johnny as the pilot, but when they all go up to a space station to check it out, the expected cosmic storm comes early and irradiates them all—Reed, Ben, Johnny, Sue, and Victor. They get their powers and Victor starts going nuts because the accident tanked his business’s stocks. Eventually the team has to stop him.

How is this movie? It’s a professionally-made movie that from a visual standpoint isn’t too bad. The effects aren’t at today’s standards, but they’re not absurd. The 1994 movie makes Reed stretch through in-camera tricks like putting the camera behind his shoulder and then moving a false hand away from him so you can’t see his real arm. I can’t emphasize enough, the 1994 movie’s effects are like what you and your teenage friend could do in your backyard. This one has actual CGI (the Human Torch was hand-drawn animated in the 1994 version!). The acting is also “professional,” but the overall chemistry is lame. It was hard to watch after a while, although I blame the writing more than the acting. The thing is, there’s a lot of comedy, but the jokes just aren’t well done, they constantly fall flat. So instead of feeling like a lot of funny jokes, the movie itself feels like a joke. It’s not ironic, it’s just cheesy.

There are also a lot of pretty sexist and objectifying scenes of Sue that really stand out as pathetic examples of fan service. I ended up constantly feeling embarrassed for what Jessica Alba had to do in this movie.

This movie starts the trend of having Doom get his powers at the same time as the Fantastic Four. It’s odd. Clearly there is a lack of confidence that Doom can look like the comics version of Doom and that he can have a storyline that really matches his powers or origin. There’s no mysticism to Doom, there’s not even any tech to Doom’s armor in any of these movies. There’s no fury or tragedy in his hubris that led to him learning his mother’s magic or trying to communicate with her soul, no triumph of his will in suborning the monks into making his armor. The origin of the Doom of the comics is an illustration of how he is not limited by normal human capacity. His will and goals and methods are beyond what anyone else can or will do. Here, he’s just a businessman in an accident.

Sometimes we see the heroes and villains have a shared origin in the comics or MCU—for instance the MCU Red Guardian or Winter Soldier have a Super Soldier Serum like Cap, which leads to interesting questions about whether the SSS is really what makes Cap “better” than normal people; similarly, the Abomination and Leader were created by gamma rays like the Hulk, leading to questions of exactly who is a monster, and why. But sharing in the FF’s accident doesn’t add to the FF/Doom dynamic. The implications of the accident are that Reed is responsible for what happens to Ben, which leads to him always trying to cure him. That does now happen in this case, Reed is somewhat responsible for Victor’s transformation in both this movie and the 2015 movie, but that’s not nearly as fertile a ground as Doom’s actual storyline. This is something I hope the MCU Doom (who is supposedly not in First Steps, but will still loom over it and appear afterwards) does a better job with.

Still, the 2005 movie is ok. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible as long as you go in with realistic expectations. It has some fun scenes, the family relations work, and Doom is pretty tough even if he is very different from the comics. It can keep your attention and feels like it’s trying to respect the source material even if it’s inconsistent in its tone.

2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

The sequel, which came out fairly quickly, made a little less: $302 million. It has a Popcornmeter of 51%.

I’ve seen these movies multiple times and my memory was that the sequel was an improvement, even if it was imperfect. But seeing them again in quick succession really made me feel like Rise of the Silver Surfer was a drop in quality.

The “it’s all a joke” aspect felt even more extensive. I just couldn’t take the movie seriously. It was too full of tropes, too full of dumb jokes that flopped. This joke feeling lessens over the course of the movie as the whole “end of the world” scenario comes to the forefront, but they spend an awful lot of time on dumb jokes at the beginning. And its special effects actually came across as worse, perhaps because they were more ambitious in attempting to create the Silver Surfer and the effects of his powers. The tech just wasn’t up to that ambition and looked cheesy as a result. And the sexism revolving around Sue doesn’t go away. If anything, it’s worse, because Sue’s character feels dumbed down from the first movie. In 2005, she was a confident executive and scientist; here she just comes across as a lovelorn whiner who’s tired of Reed spending too much time working.

The storyline is that a couple years after the first movie, Reed and Sue are getting married but they’re so famous that attempts to put together the ceremony keep falling flat. There’s a super-lame bachelor party. Weird weather effects start popping up all around the world—which is actually very accurate to the original comics appearance of the Surfer—for anyone who hasn’t read that story, it’s actually really weird (in a good way) and not at all what the later Surfer’s planetary appearances are like. It turns out that the Surfer is checking out the planet in advance of Galactus, who is an energy cloud like the Ultimate Universe’s Gah Lak Tus (his clouds form is also somewhat similar to the energy cloud that gave them their powers in 2005). The Surfer’s effects accidentally release Doom from his imprisonment. Doom and the FF work to stop the Surfer and eventually Doom steals his power, again in a way that does nicely call back to a classic comics storyline. The FF confront Doom and the Surfer joins them against his master. The good guys win but the Surfer is lost to space.

This movie has all the classic family arguments among the characters that are typical of an FF comic, but it takes them even further than in the first movie. Everyone is at each other’s throats, and Doom goes much more bananas than in the first movie.

It’s cool to see the Surfer, and I appreciate the cosmic level of powers seen on screen, but overall, I wouldn’t recommend this movie due to the ramped up “it’s all a joke” character dynamics and worse effects.

2015’s Fantastic Four

This move did much worse at the box office, bringing in only $168 million, and its Popcornmeter is only 18%. I actually feel quite differently about it. In comparison to the 2005 and 2007 movies, I think the 2015 movie is a much better experience.

It takes itself seriously. It attempts to get you to identify with the characters, who it takes seriously. It builds a real, dramatic relationship among those characters. It looks good visually; its effects are solid and the cinematography is nuanced. The acting in particular is way, way better than in the previous movies.

In terms of effects, I kept comparing how the different movies visualized the different characters’ powers. In the 1994 and 2005/7 movies, the Thing is a rubber suit. In the 1994 movie, it is SO obvious. You can clearly see the cut-out spaces for his eyes with the skin around them, it’s like a commercial Halloween mask from Walmart. The 2005 suit looks way better, but it’s obviously a suit. The 2015 Thing is completely special effects. He looks like actual rocks grinding around as he walks. Now he also looks weird because it’s a full-body effect, and he doesn’t wear shorts. This may be more “realistic” but it’s also kind of dorky-looking at the same time.

Now this movie is no Citizen Kane, don’t get me wrong. I’d say it’s equivalent to a mid-tier MCU movie. Not great but not at all terrible. Better than something like Quantumania or Love & Thunder.

It does reinvent the standard FF storyline significantly. A teenage Reed has been working with his junkyard-working friend Ben for years to build a teleporter in his garage. He meets Franklin Storm, an adult who’s in charge of a big science project to do the same thing. Franklin’s daughter Sue is also a teen scientist there. They hire Reed and re-hire Victor, who had been working there but had quit out of frustration with the system. Johnny is a race car driver who has been too wild and is forced to work on the project by his father, Franklin. They build the teleporter but when the military/capitalist Powers That Be say they’re going to take it away from them, Reed, Johnny, and Victor get drunk and decide to try it out themselves. They call in Ben, who Reed hasn’t seen in months and the others don’t know at all (so it makes about as little sense for him to be there as it does for Sue and Johnny in the comics). They go to another dimension (probably loosely based on the Negative Zone, although there’s no direct allusion to anything connected to it) instead of another location in their universe. That dimension is full of weird energy. It starts to erupt and Victor falls off a cliff into an explosion of the energy. The others get back home but are affected by the energy; Sue, who wasn’t with them, is affected by energy coming from the capsule as it crash-opens back in their reality. The government takes them all prisoner and wants to use them as tools for war. Ben agrees since he thinks they will cure him. Johnny agrees because he thinks it’s fun. Sue is cynical about it but wants to practice her abilities. Reed escapes and the military searches for him. Reed wants to cure Ben and tries to figure out how. Finally they capture him again. They make him fix the capsule so the military can get back to the other, energy-rich, dimension. There they find Doom, who is in bad shape. They bring him back but he’s obviously insane and goes back to the other dimension, which he plans to use to destroy their original world. Johnny, Sue, Reed, and Ben follow and defeat him. They come back and negotiate a big research facility to work in on their own.

One detail that I think is fascinating, but not followed up on, is that while Doom is, of course, eastern European, so is Sue, who is from Kosovo. This is the explanation for why she was adopted into the Storm family. She and Reed make jokes about how she doesn’t have an accent and there’s really no other reference to it. Someone’s place of origin doesn’t have to have a big impact on a story, but I think it would have been interesting for them to explore more of the geographical connection between her and Victor. That could really create a much more interesting and unique relationship between the two of them. Otherwise, it’s a really random fact to just bring up and then drop.

How is it? I felt totally fine re-watching this movie. It was not a chore, it was not boring. There were dumb things; again we have Doom not looking like Doom, and not having his powers, and he somehow gets a green cloak while stranded in the barren other dimension. The energy of the other dimension isn’t really explained. Why would Franklin Storm hire only teenagers for his project? But the end fight is decent and I mostly cared about the characters, whose dynamics seemed real. And the effects were easily the best out of the bunch. Would I recommend it to someone? Yes—with some reservations, of course, but I can easily see people being interested in what it offers. It has flaws, but so do the MCU and DCEU movies that have made a billion dollars and gained widespread audience acceptance.

Compare and Contrast!

This chart shows a bunch of tropes and questions from across the movies.

The Future

When it comes to First Steps, what do you want to see?

Which of the above characteristics would you like to see continued?

If the 2005 and 2015 movies featured Johnny Storm actors who went on to other comic movie breakout roles as Captain America and Killmonger, what do you think this Johnny Storm will do after First Steps? More importantly, what about his haircut?

What would you like Doom to look like—comics-style, or something else? (Doom isn't going to be in First Steps, but eventually.) Should he be an alt-universe Tony Stark or should there be some other reason for him to be played by Robert Downey Jr? Do you think this will sort of variant on Reed being Doom in the new Ultimate Universe? (I only read the beginning of that story, maybe that has evolved.)

What other characters would be fun to see besides Doom and Galactus in an FF-connected MCU storyline?

What other villains or characters are key to their identity? Alicia, for sure; Franklin and Valeria are very important and would be cool in a movie at some point. I’d love to see some Future Foundation kids but that seems unlikely. The Mole Man is definitely a classic repeated villain with a clear and honestly fairly complex personality. Annihilus has a lot of cinematic style. Namor is strongly connected to the FF mythos. I really enjoyed him in Wakanda Forever and would love to have him continued. The Skrulls are another obvious FF antagonist but I’m not sure if the FF would really be a specific enemy for them in the MCU, especially since they already did the Super Skrull thing using other powers in Secret Invasion. The Impossible Man? I would love that but can’t see it happening. Psycho-Man and the Hate Master would be very timely but I think almost too overt as a cultural symbol. Agatha Harkness could get connected back to them but it feels like she’s going to stay more in the Avengers world. Kang would fit in very well. He’s both an FF and an Avengers villain. But it’s not clear if he’s going to really continue now that Jonathan Majors is out. Would they bring back the Inhumans from the Marvel purgatory in which that show was so appropriately put in? Again, I kind of doubt it, but it would be interesting to see them done well. The Wizard? The Maker, drawing on even more multi-dimensionality? Of course, my fave-rave would be Molecule Man, and with the Secret Wars scenario coming up, the inclusion of Owen Reece, who would normally be the longest of long shots, could actually be somewhat possible although I'm not holding my breath. But if he's in it, and you hear a loud squeal coming from the northeast US in 2027, that's me.

What are your thoughts on the existing movies and what do you hope for most from First Steps? What do you want to see them do with the Surfer and Galactus? Are you feeling good about the possibilities of the retro-alternate universe? Thoughts on how it will connect to Doomsday and Secret Wars? Will the Thunderbolts actually be the first to meet them in the prime universe?