The Fantastic Four Were Too Powerful For Earth-616, Director Matt Shakman Says
It’s continuity time.
Disney’s acquisition of Fox solved a massive problem for Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, which had been without its two most popular teams for 17 years, but it also sired a few plot holes that Marvel creatives have had to get, well, creative about solving. Fans really want to see the X-Men and the Fantastic Four in the MCU, but introducing them this late in the game, after threats like Thanos have come and gone, offers a continuity challenge.
Marvel learned this the hard way with Eternals, which revealed that the team had been forced to live in the shadows since the dawn of humanity. Not every fan appreciated that attempt to reconcile the characters with the timeline, and it’ll be even harder with these far more popular absentees.
Neither the X-Men nor the Fantastic Four live by a code like the Eternals’ — if they were around when Thanos was threatening universal genocide, they would have helped. That’s why The Marvels introduced mutants in a different universe, and according to director Matt Shakman, that’s also why the Fantastic Four find themselves on a parallel Earth in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps had to get creative with its title team.
In an interview with SFX, Shakman revealed more about the choice to set Fantastic Four in a retrofuturist utopia. For one thing, it served as a meta nod to the team’s origins: the Fantastic Four “were created in this time of optimism during the space race,” Shakman said. “People were dreaming of the stars, they were imagining conquering the unknown, and that is what the Fantastic Four is all about. [By] putting them back in the ‘60s, we were getting close to their point of origin, which felt like the right place for them to be.”
There was also a behind-the-scenes reason to place them in a different universe. “We didn’t want them to be on this Earth with the other Marvel characters — because where were they when Thanos came?” Shakman said. “They would have helped out and would have solved the problem.”
Help from the Fantastic Four definitely would have made the fight against Thanos easier, and might have even kept him from snapping away half of all life in the universe. Simply keeping the Fantastic Four in the past might have helped Marvel avoid the Eternals problem for a one-off adventure, but since Marvel is in the thick of the Multiverse Saga, bringing the team in from a parallel dimension was an opportunity too interesting to pass up. “So, we put them on a different Earth: Earth-828,” Shakman said.
The Fantastic Four hail from a different universe, a clever way to combat Marvel’s continuity issues.
Creating a new universe also allowed Fantastic Four to make more direct tributes to their creator, Jack Kirby (Earth-828 nods to Kirby’s birthday, August 28). Shakman has been adamant about bringing Kirby’s aesthetic into live-action, a feat that previous Fantastic Four movies haven’t been able to crack. That passion is just one of many details that sets First Steps apart from its predecessors, and as long as viewers buy this solution to one of Marvel’s peskier continuity issues, the MCU will be all the better for it.
