The Fantastic Four: First Steps is making big strides at the box office as the latest MCU entry on the 2025 movie schedule (the last one for the year), and while I wouldn’t call it my favorite, it does get closer to something I’ve been clamoring for: smaller stories.
For the first decade of the MCU, starting with Iron Man and ending with Avengers: Endgame, the universe, like our own, just kept expanding. It was fantastic. But, I hit a wall with it, and I started to get frustrated. I think they should have brought things back down to earth with more “human-sized” superheroes and villains after hitting a crescendo with Endgame. The new Fantastic Four movie almost gives me what I crave, but not quite.
The Story Is Both In And Out Of The MCU — In A Good Way
First, I’ll talk about what I liked. The story in First Steps stands on its own, and I love that. It’s set on a different Earth in the multiverse, and, at least so far, it’s not connected to it. First Steps stands on its own in many universes that make up the MCU. The Fantastic Four are the only superheroes (that we know of) there, and the story in the movie is set entirely in that universe.
This is what the MCU should have done after Endgame. Bring back stories of individual superheroes, like Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and a personal favorite of mine, Iron Man 2, did in the early days of the franchise. This is the approach that Daredevil: Born Again took earlier this year, and I loved watching with my Disney+ subscription. In fact, I wrote at the time that the MCU could take a lesson from that.
Because First Steps is its own self-contained story, and is serving as a soft-reset for the MCU as the first movie of Phase 6, it succeeds, at least in my eyes. It shows that not every single movie or story has to be interconnected with the ever-expanding, all-consuming multiverse. I might have blown a gasket had Dr. Strange suddenly appeared to send Galactis to another world. Instead, the main heroes figured out the problem on their own.
I Said It ‘Almost Gets There’
I sarcastically joked a few months ago, before I knew who the villain in First Steps would be, that I was sick of every villain in the MCU being someone who could “eat a planet.” So, Galactis, who literally eats planets, wasn’t exactly my idea of bringing the MCU back to earth, so to speak. If I were ranking the MCU movies based on story alone, this one would be somewhere in the bottom half.
A Galactis-level villain should be saved for team-ups, like an Avengers movie. In the meantime, give me some less powerful villains who can’t just destroy all life on earth with the snap of a finger (sorry, Thanos). Mole Man, or Red Ghost (who was supposed to at least make an appearance in this movie), or any other of a number of the Four’s rogues gallery, would have fit the bill perfectly here.
In the end, I really did like The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and I think it succeeds in a lot of ways, both in kicking off Phase Six of the MCU and as a soft reboot. It’s not a perfect movie, but it is a great one. I love the vibe of the movie, and it sets up their family dynamic wonderfully. It’s just still a little too much. I hope Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which hits theaters as part of the 2026 movie schedule, keeps moving in this direction.
