The One Thing Fantastic Four (2005) Did That Marvel Needs to Emulate

With an MCU’s take on the Fantastic Four looming over cinemas like a hungry, hungry Galactus, some superhero fans are revisiting past iterations. And, to be frank, too many of these folks are getting it wrong when they defend 2005’s Fantastic Four or the 2007 follow-up Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. In case you missed it, there are more than a few 2000s babies who are wearing their nostalgia glasses extra tight when they argue that the vacuous performances by Jessica Alba or Ioan Gruffudd are good takes on the Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic. Yes, there are even people defending Julian McMahon’s Doctor Doom, which turns the greatest villain in all of fiction into a petulant rich guy.

Some defend the movies out of knee-jerk contrarianism, instinctively pushing back on the extremely expensive MCU film that will surely make a ton of money. Others commit that common mistake of confusing a movie they liked when they were five with a good movie that should be respected by people who aren’t five.

The Fantastic Four reclamation project is disappointing in part because of a hyperbolic refusal to admit the films’ faults also distracts attention from the one thing those two movies do actually achieve. For as much as he fails to capture the sci-fi wonder of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four, director Tim Story perfectly captured the loving antagonism between Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm, setting one bar that The Fantastic Four: First Steps must clear.

Baxter Building Antics

The first meeting of Johnny Storm (Chris Evans) and Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) in Fantastic Four could have been terrible. There’s on the nose dialogue in which Ben gripes to Reed about having to work with Johnny because he snuck “two Victoria’s Secret wannabes” into a NASA flight simulator. And there’s the sludgiest mid-2000s metal blasting over the soundtrack as Johnny rides his motorbike to the launch site in his big screen entrance. Even the duo’s first appearances in 1961 comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby feel less dated.

And yet, Evans’ snarky smirk and Chiklis’ simmering irritation sells the lame dialogue from the script by Mark Frost (yes, that one) and Michael France. So good are the performances, in fact, it actually works when the movie sequesters the team in the Baxter Building for the entire second act. Normally, nothing’s worse than superheroes spending a big part of the movie not wanting to be superheroes (see, the disastrous 2015 Fantastic Four). But as in his most successful film Barbershop (2002), Story proves that he understands how to deliver sitcom-style laughs.

That approach is most apparent in a montage that follows Reed’s declaration that the team needs to stay out of sight. Yes, we get one of the many tiresome bits in which we almost see Sue naked, which is about the only thing that the movie wants to do with Alba. But the other gags work, especially a runner in which Johnny tries to do the old shaving cream on the hand prank. The escalation as Johnny tries increasingly aggressive ways to tickle Ben, and Evans’ childish collapse at the end, injects a lightness that this Fantastic Four desperately needs.

So effective is the back and forth between the two that Story wisely uses it to set up the team’s public reveal. When Johnny uses his powers and announces the team’s superhero names at an X-Games event (did I mention the movie is from 2005?), the others confront him outside the arena. An enraged Ben crunches Johnny’s hotrod into a ball, prompting the Torch to throw fireballs at the Thing. In between, Mr. Fantastic uses his elastic body to cushion a punch while Invisible Girl creates a forcefield to push the two apart.

Is it the most fantastic debut for the Fantastic Four? No. But it is in keeping with the original comics.

Marvel’s First Frenemies

Any comic book nerd can tell you that the FF aren’t superheroes as much as they are a family of explorers. As evidence, they will point to the fact that the team doesn’t even get its familiar blue and white costumes until the third issue of their series, after wearing civvies to battle Mole Man and the Skrulls.

However, it’s also true that the team doesn’t really become a family until much later, arguably until Reed and Sue get engaged in Fantastic Four #35 (1965). Until then the team operated more like a bunch of antagonists stuck together than they did a family, especially Johnny and Ben. In fact, as early as Fantastic Four #2, the two nearly come to blows, stopped only so they can deal with the Skrull invaders.

Over the years, the anger between the two has been softened into a brotherly rivalry. But that doesn’t mean they won’t still pick at each other, as demonstrated by the pranks that regularly occur in Fantastic Four comics. And that’s something the 2005 movie understands.

Will The Fantastic Four: First Steps understand that as well? The latest trailer does feature Joseph Quinn’s Johnny ribbing Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben about saying “it’s clobberin’ time,” but the rest of the promotional material has focused on the FF as a family. While that means we might actually get a movie with a fully developed Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) and an interesting Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), it doesn’t bode well for the Human Torch and the Thing.

First Steps Forward

To be clear, the success of these interactions does not make Fantastic Four a good movie. Just remember that the Baxter Building montage is proceeded by an unforgivably hacky bit in which Alba must strip off her clothes so Sue Storm can go invisible and evade fans. Even worse is the movie’s climax, in which the team nonchalantly gathers to do battle with Doctor Doom, who has somehow become even more whiny now that he’s wearing a mask.

Still, if The Fantastic Four: First Steps is going to be the proper cinematic presentation of Marvel’s First Family that it purports to be, then it needs to take a page from the 2005 movie and give us at least one scene in which Ben and Johnny pull childish pranks on one another.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps arrives in theaters on July 25, 2025.