- UK release: July 2025
- Director: Matt Shakman · Writers: Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer
- Studio / distributor: Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- Genre: Retro-futurist superhero science fiction · Runtime: 114 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian, The Last of Us) as Reed Richards; Vanessa Kirby (Mission: Impossible - Fallout, The Crown) as Sue Storm; Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) as Johnny Storm; Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear, Andor) as Ben Grimm; Ralph Ineson (The Witch, The Green Knight) as Galactus
- IMDb: 7.0 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 86% critics / 90% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
The Fantastic Four have been Marvel’s longest-running embarrassment on screen. Two unloved Tim Story films in the mid-2000s, a 2015 reboot so troubled its own director disowned it on the way out, and a comic-book pedigree, the very first family of the modern Marvel age, that none of those attempts managed to honour. So the bar that First Steps has to clear is partly artistic and partly a matter of exorcism, and the surprise is how lightly it steps over both. Matt Shakman, who turned WandaVision into the most formally inventive thing the studio has made for television, has done something the previous films never tried: he has let the Fantastic Four simply be the Fantastic Four, on their own terms, in their own world.
The setup
The smartest decision here is to wall the team off from everything else. First Steps unfolds not in the familiar shared universe but on an alternate Earth styled as an optimistic 1960s that never stopped believing in the future: chrome, valves, ticker-tape parades and a city that treats its four resident astronauts as beloved public figures rather than vigilantes in hiding. Reed Richards and Sue Storm are married and expecting a child; her brother Johnny and their friend Ben Grimm round out a household as much as a team. Into this settled life comes the Silver Surfer, a herald announcing that the planet-eater Galactus has marked Earth for consumption, and the film becomes a question of whether a family can save a world without sacrificing one of its own to do it.
The cast
This is the warmest Marvel ensemble in some time, and the casting carries it. Pedro Pascal plays Reed as a man whose intelligence is a kind of anxiety, forever running the numbers on a problem he is terrified of getting wrong, and it is a quieter register than the swaggering genius the role usually invites. Vanessa Kirby is the film’s centre of gravity, giving Sue a steel that the script wisely refuses to soften; she is the one making the hard calls while everyone else argues. Joseph Quinn brings real charm to Johnny, more curious than cocky, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach finds the melancholy under Ben Grimm’s rocky hide without ever tipping into self-pity. They play like people who have lived in the same house for years, which is the one thing every previous version of these characters failed to convey. Ralph Ineson lends Galactus a cathedral-deep voice and a genuine sense of scale, a threat that feels less like a villain than a force of physics.
The craft
Shakman and cinematographer Jess Hall commit fully to the retro-futurist conceit, and the production design is the film’s great pleasure: a Kirby-by-way-of-Eames vision of tomorrow, all curved consoles and confident primary colours, shot with a clean warmth that feels deliberately analogue. Michael Giacchino’s score leans into the optimism, brassy and adventurous where so much of the genre now defaults to grey portent. The decision to keep the canvas small, one family, one city, one threat, pays off in clarity; at 114 minutes this is among the leaner Marvel pictures, and it moves. The cosmic sequences, when they arrive, have a weight and silence that recall the better hard science fiction rather than the usual weightless light-show. If there is a cost to the compression, it is that a couple of beats land before they have quite been earned, the film occasionally telling you a bond is deep rather than showing it forming.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is The Incredibles, which understood twenty years ago that the Fantastic Four were always a family drama wearing a superhero costume, and First Steps finally brings that insight back to the source. Set against Guardians of the Galaxy, it shares the appetite for cosmic strangeness and a strong needle-drop sensibility but trades the irony for sincerity, which suits these characters far better. And against Shakman’s own WandaVision, it is the same instinct, to root the spectacle in a marriage and a home, given a much bigger budget. Measured against the two earlier Fantastic Four runs, there is no contest; this is the first time the material has been treated as an asset rather than an obligation.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are running warm, around 86%, with audiences a notch higher near 90%, and for once the two camps largely agree. The praise clusters on the family chemistry, the production design and the relief of a self-contained story; the reservations are about a plot that feels compressed and a sense that the wider franchise machinery is idling in the wings, waiting to claim these characters. Both readings are fair. My own response sits with the audience: I came out talking about the world far more than the plot mechanics, and a Marvel film that makes you want to spend more time in its company rather than less is doing the hard part right.
Verdict
This is the Fantastic Four film that should have existed two decades ago. It is generous, good-looking, genuinely fond of its characters, and confident enough to tell a contained story rather than a feature-length advertisement for the next one. It is not flawless; the back half hurries, and the franchise obligations hover just out of frame. But it is rewatchable in the way the best of these films are, built on a world I would happily return to and a household worth caring about, and it values craft and optimism over noise. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, including IMAX. The retro-futurist design and the cosmic scale are both worth the larger screen.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: First Steps arrived on 4K, Blu-ray and digital in the autumn of 2025 and reached Disney+ thereafter, where it slots in as the opening act of Marvel’s next phase. The contained, self-sufficient quality praised at release looks, in hindsight, like the point of the exercise, an origin built to stand on its own before the wider crossovers pull these characters into the larger story.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate threat, violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: A man’s body is violently stretched in order to cause pain, although the context is supernatural. During fantastical fight sequences, opponents punch others and fire blasts of energy and beams of fire.
Threat and horror: People are chased and attacked by powerful enemies, including when a pregnant woman is pursued by a villain seeking her unborn child as she goes into labour. A fantastical being threatens to bring about an apocalypse.
Injury detail: A man’s face has bloody cuts in the aftermath of violence.
Language: There is use of mild bad language (‘bullshit’), as well as use of milder terms such as ‘Jesus’, ‘God’ and ‘hell’.
Sex: There are occasional references to sex, including when a woman suggests how she became pregnant.
Nudity: There is very brief comic buttock nudity.
Theme: There are references to the deaths of loved ones; however, such remarks are brief and do not feature strong detail. References are also made to a couple struggling to conceive a child.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
