Marvel casts the Fantastic Four

Marvel has announced the casting for their forthcoming new Fantastic Four movie. Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us, The Mandalorian, Game of Thrones) will play Reed Richards / Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby (The Crown) will play Sue Storm / Invisible Woman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) will play Ben Grimm / The Thing and Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) will play Johnny Storm / The Human Torch, in a film directed by Matt Shakman (WandaVision).

The film, apparently titled The Fantastic 4, introduces the team to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time. It will, however, be the fifth movie to feature the characters. Roger Corman directed the ultra-low-budget The Fantastic Four in 1994 as a rights-holding exercise. 20th Century Fox released Fantastic Four in 2005, starring Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards, Jessica Alba as Susan Storm, a pre-Captain America Chris Evans as Johnny Storm and Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm. Despite mixed reviews, the film was financially successful and spawned a direct sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), which was less successful.

A new version of the team appeared in 2015 as Fantastic Four, starring Miles Teller as Reed Richards, Kate Mara as Susan Storm, a pre-Killmonger Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm and Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm. The film was poorly received both critically and commercially.

Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige confirmed in 2019 that the team would be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, following the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Marvel's parent company, Disney. Originally Jon Watts was going to direct, but he was later replaced by Matt Shakman.

The team are iconic because they were the first superhero team created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby for Marvel Comics in November 1961 as part of a revamp of the company's lines, designed to compete with DC Comics' Justice League of America (which saw Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other characters joining forces). Lee and Kirby created the Fantastic Four as a similar team out from scratch. Lee, with Kirby and other artists, later added new superheroes to the same universe, resulting in The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, Falcon and Daredevil. He also resurrected characters Marvel had the rights to from years earlier, resulting in the comics Sub-Mariner and Captain America. Periodically these heroes would team up to fight greater threats, in a run known as The Avengers.

Fantastic Four was also notable for debuting many other characters who would go on to have huge success for Marvel Comics: Namor the Sub-Mariner, Doctor Doom, Black Panther, the Kree and Skrull, Adam Warlock, the Inhumans, Silver Surfer and Galactus. The comic ran almost without interruption until issue #645 in 2015. The comic was rested, although the characters would appear in other titles; fan speculation at the time was that Marvel was downplaying those characters whose movie rights they did not control, as they felt they were giving free advertising to competitors. However, the comic relaunched in late 2018, fans again cynically noting that the 20th Century Fox/Marvel deal was in the wind at the time so it was assumed that Marvel Studios would shortly gain control of the film rights, as was proven to be the case.

The Fantastic 4 will be released on 25 July 2025. It will be one of four Marvel movies scheduled for the year, following Captain America: Brave New World in February and Thunderbolts on 2 May and preceding Blade in November. This will mark a return in force for Marvel, who only have a single film out this year: Deadpool & Wolverine on 26 July.

Eternals

Seven thousand years ago, a group of super-powered begins known as "Eternals" arrived on Earth to safeguard the planet from mutated creatures called Deviants. Five centuries ago they defeated the last Deviant and split up, living undercover as humans until such time that they are recalled for their next mission by their masters, the Celestials. However, the return of the Deviants and the death of one of their number spurts the Eternals to reunite and face down a new threat.

The Eternals began life as a Marvel Comics team, created in 1976 by Jack Kirby after his defection to DC Comics in 1970 to work on the New Gods comics line. Unceremoniously cancelled by DC, Kirby brought the idea back to Marvel and reworked it (to avoid getting sued), where it was more successful. Though not quite a Marvel mainstay, the Eternals have resurfaced intermittently through the years, crossing over with other Marvel properties and characters.

The news that Marvel Studios was developing a movie based on the team was a surprise, given it was a relatively obscure group of characters and integrating the high-powered, celestial team with the more grounded characters elsewhere in the MCU was going to be challenging. However, the MCU's unexpected success in making characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy work gave the studio greater confidence in proceeding with the project, even tapping the much-feted Chloe Zhao to direct and co-write (Zhao won an Oscar for her previous movie, Nomadland, whilst working on Eternals).

The result is an ambitious movie. Most MCU films introduce one or at most two or three major new characters to the MCU at any one time. Eternals introduces a mind-boggling ten at once. Although the film does have some previous work to rest on - the Celestials were introduced in 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy - it doe have a lot of its own worldbuilding to bring into the mix. It also has to establish each Celestial's major power and ability, as well as their motivation and characterisation. This it achieves through flashbacks to different periods in Earth's history, showing where the Eternals were present and how events changed them and their characters.

Eternals also makes a very bold decision: to drop most of the MCU's snarky, pop-reference-laden humour. Not completely, of course, there are still some jokes and a few quips and a bit of family banter, but the humour is toned down here from the MCU norm, which will be a relief to those tired of the humour undercutting the seriousness of the action. However, it is also a problem in that leaves Eternals as the most serious - and occasionally dour - Marvel movie since Thor: The Dark World.

Fortunately the film mostly overcomes that. The runtime is dangerously close to creaky at well over two and a half hours, but there's so many stories, characters and ideas on display here that the pacing generally doesn't flag. If anything, it could be argued that Eternals needed to be longer, say a six or eight-hour mini-series on Disney+ which could introduce the characters and add a lot more weight to their backgrounds. As it stands, the film feels like a truncated Greatest Hits of a band you've only just encountered which leaves a lot of great work on the cutting room floor.

The cast is stacked and for the most part excellent, particularly Richard Madden as Ikaris, Lia McHugh as Sprite, Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos, Salma Hayek as Ajak and Angelina Jolie as Thena. Lauren Ridloff (Makkari) is great but gets disappointingly little to do, whilst Kit Harington shows up solely to set up his role in a completely different project (likely the upcoming Blade reboot). Gemma Chan is fine as Sersi but feels like she needed some better writing, as she ends up being arguably the least-defined Eternal (power and character-wise) despite being our viewpoint character for most of the movie. In fact, the connections to the rest of the MCU - the Eternals defend why they didn't intervene in any of the previous incidents where Earth was threatened, and Kingo laments not being able to reconnect with old buddy Thor - feel very incongruous, to the point where this may have worked better as a completely stand-alone film.

Eternals does do something interesting and relatively original though, namely in that all the characters that matter are in the actual main team. The enemies are monsters rather than some nefarious, offscreen villain and the tension and drama comes from divisions within the team as they debate strategy. A late-film plot twist is effective in splitting the group apart and setting us up for a Civil War-style internal dispute, which is a bold move given we've only just met these characters. In fact, it feels like Eternals' plot might have been better saved for the sequel, with this first film instead focusing on meeting the characters in a more relaxed way as they fight a more generic threat. However, you can't fault the ambition here. Eternals seems to know that audiences are in danger of getting bored with the traditional Marvel formula and tries to spruce it up with a greater focus on internal dissent and a more well-balanced conflict between people whose powers, abilities and weaknesses (even the bad guys get those) are established beforehand.

The result is an interesting movie which isn't altogether successful. Eternals (****) has a great cast, a strong central plot, some genuinely impressive vfx sequences (increasingly hard these days) and surprisingly good pacing, despite its length. However, it also biting off more than it can chew narratively, not all the characters are as well-developed as others, the links with the MCU feel contrived and the film's lack of humour leaves it feeling a bit heavy on occasion (and the fewer moments of humour now feel incongruous). The things it does well, it does very well though, and it's definitely an MCU movie that at least feels like it's trying to do something fresh.

Eternals is now available globally on Disney+.