After years of anticipation, speculation and fan excitement, Matt Shakman's The Fantastic Four: First Steps and James Gunn's Superman are finally making their way into theaters. One of the most talked-about aspects from both films has been the costume design. While pretty much any superhero costume can be considered hard to adapt, Marvel's First Family and the Last Son of Krypton's super duds are arguably among the trickiest to get right.
Both sets of characters are known for their colorful yet, most importantly, simplistic outfits, and that presents a challenge for costume designers. Make the suits too faithful to the source material, and you run the risk of making the actors look silly. But, try to ground them too much, and you risk making them look too over-designed, or even militaristic.
The reception to the costumes in both movies has been interesting. For the most part, The Fantastic Four's outfits have been well-received, but there have been some negative comments regarding the materials used. Superman has been the most contentious, with a seemingly equal amount of people liking and disliking it for different reasons.
Now, I'm a huge Superman and FF fan, so the different reception to the costumes sparked a question in my head that I wanted to pose to the CBM community to answer: Which film best captured its characters' outfits - Superman or The Fantastic Four? Whatever your answer is, what put one design above the other for you? Go down to the comments and give your thoughts.
Keep in mind, this is not meant to be a competition between the two. Costume designers work incredibly hard to bring our beloved characters into the screen in a way that feels believable and fun at the same time, so their work should be recognized. It's just a fun debate to have, given the closeness in release dates between the two films, and the arguably equally difficult nature of translating their costumes to a live-action setting.
It's also fun to think about, given just how different the two styles of costumes are from one another in these upcoming features, despite the comic book Fantastic Four and Man of Steel costumes being so similar in terms of texture and simplistic design nature.
So, let's have some fun and ponder which film did the better job at bringing the fantastical to life for our beloved crime-fighters.
Superman arrives on July 11, 2025. The Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters on July 25, 2025.