First Steps' To Save 'Avengers Doomsday'

The Fantastic Four is extremely important to Marvel, but the company spent decades allowing movie studios to completely miss (and misunderstand) what people liked about the characters and how to make them work in the first place. That mostly changed with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which took the team seriously by… not taking it too seriously, and while it wasn’t a planet-eating hit at the box office, it proved that Marvel Studios and director Matt Shakman knew what they were doing. Now everyone at Marvel just has to remember that lesson for Avengers: Doomsday.

Not counting Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four movie, which is its whole own thing, the last three Fantastic Four movies all tried — and failed — to be a little too cool and rise above their comic book origins. The 2005 movie had Doctor Doom, but it made him into more of a generic supervillain than the tyrannical ruler of a foreign nation like he is in the comics. Its sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, made the deeply annoying sin of depicting iconic mega-villain Galactus as a boring space cloud. Then, Josh Trank’s reboot in 2015 tried way too hard to seem cool and also didn’t get Doom right, and it’s all because nobody trusted audiences to get on board with a team called “The Fantastic Four” led by a guy who can stretch (even though they’ve been an iconic part of comic book history for decades).

What Can ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ Teach Marvel for ‘Avengers: Doomsday’?

H.E.R.B.I.E. in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

We know that Avengers: Doomsday is doing something new with Doctor Doom, who will be played by Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr. through some kind of multiverse shenanigans. But, unlike the Doom mistakes in previous movies, that seems like an encouraging sign. Everyone wants to see Doom sitting in a castle in his homeland of Latveria, which we may very well get in some way (there is a quick Latveria tease in First Steps), but the fact that there are multiverse shenanigans in play means that something silly is going on — and we mean silly in a good way, like how First Steps used retro-futuristic aesthetics to differentiate its world from the main MCU world, or how it didn’t shy away from Galactus being a big man in a big helmet.

What Marvel Studios needs to do for Avengers: Doomsday is just let everything be weird. The MCU has been relatively rocky lately, especially when compared to its Avengers: Endgame heyday, but this is still the same series of movies that got everyone to care about the emotions of a tree and spent several movies hyping up magic rocks. People are at least mostly on board with this multiverse stuff and everyone liked seeing Galactus walking through New York, so Avengers: Doomsday better not do what the failed Fantastic Four movies did by pretending to be something it’s not. Comic book movies are cool, we all like comic book movies, so hopefully Marvel Studios and returning directors Joe and Anthony Russo let it be a comic book movie. Give us Doctor Doom in a full metal suit with robot goons, give us The Beyonder, give us the Annihilation Wave, give us the Cancerverse! People can handle that stuff now.

And we might not have to wait too long to see if they’re going to pull it off. The trailer for Avengers: Doomsday is set to premiere alongside James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash on December 19 — almost exactly one year before Doomsday comes out. But if you can’t even wait for that, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now available on Disney+. That means you can check out Galactus’ big freakin’ helmet right now and imagine the silly/cool/weird stuff that the MCU has in store for us going forward.