The Fantastic Four: First Steps has all the makings of Marvel Studios' most unique and perhaps best movie to date. The heroes are long overdue a reboot, especially as the 2005, 2007, and 2015 movies failed to do Marvel's First Family justice.
Now, we have some new promo art that offers a hi-res look at Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and The Thing.
Looming large in the background is the Baxter Building, with the team's iconic logo put front and centre. Will that skyscraper be added to the MCU's New York post-Avengers: Secret Wars? That's the way it feels like things are headed.
Before the Fantastic Four appear in Avengers: Doomsday, they'll face Galactus and the Silver Surfer. Julia Garner plays Shalla-Bal, and recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly about her take on he character.
"I did not know that there was Shalla-Bal, for example, another form of a Silver Surfer that's not like what you think of the Silver Surfer," she said of being cast in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. "The best parts of the comics I noticed, for me, and it's the same when you watch the movies, is when it's surfing around space."
"Aesthetically, it looks incredible, and I'm just really excited to see what [director] Matt [Shakman] and Marvel is going to do with that."
Asked how she prepared to surf the spaceways, Garner added, "I am actually afraid of the ocean. So no, but I can act. I have some friends that know how to surf, and they showed me some moves before I went out to London to just kind of get the body position of it all. And then I realized shortly after I was in London that I used some surf moves, but then I also used a lot of what I saw in the comic books."
"There were different poses that, the way that they would draw them, they weren't surf poses — they almost looked like something you would see in sculptures. So I incorporated surfing with the poses of a sculpture, like moving elegantly, like a dance. So it was kind of a mixture of things, but a lot of it was from the comics that inspired me," she concluded.
Not everyone is happy with the "gender-swapped" Silver Surfer, but Shalla-Bal and Norrin Radd are not the same character and we'd guess the latter will show up somewhere down the line.
Check out this new promo art for The Fantastic Four: First Steps in the X post below.
Set against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, Marvel Studios' The Fantastic Four: First Steps introduces Marvel’s First Family—Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm/Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm/Human Torch (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm/The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) as they face their most daunting challenge yet.
Forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, they must defend Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his enigmatic Herald, Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). And if Galactus’ plan to devour the entire planet and everyone on it weren’t bad enough, it suddenly gets very personal.
Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich, and Natasha Lyonne have been cast in mystery roles. Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom is rumoured to appear, though that's surely a given with Avengers: Doomsday on the way.
Director Matt Shakman worked with both Avatar: The Way of Water co-writer Josh Friedman and WandaVision's Cam Squires on The Fantastic Four: First Steps' screenplay, with Eric Pearson (Black Widow) later coming on board for a final polish.
The movie is set to be released in theaters on July 25, 2025.