Three years after being announced at SDCC ’19, Marvel Studios Fantastic Four finally has a release date. During SDCC ’22’s Hall H presentation, Marvel Studios One-Above-All, Kevin Feige, revealed to fans that the first ever MCU-set Fantastic Four film will hit theaters in November of 2024.
While a release date has been carved out, much about the film remains up in the air. Without a director, after Jon Watts exited the project, and no writer announced as yet, Fantastic Four seems, for the moment at least, pretty directionless. Rumors have swirled that Feige has shown interest in some of Hollywood’s biggest names, including Steven Spielberg, to helm the film but SDCC came and went without a hint of a director…or a cast. It’s not all bad news, however, as Feige explains to THR, it’s because he and the top brass of Marvel Studios are taking great care in developing the project and separating it from Fox’s prior attempts to bring the First Family of Marvel Comics to the screen.
A lot of people know this origin story. A lot of people know the basics. How do we take that and bring something that they’ve never seen before? We’ve set a very high bar for ourselves with bringing that to the screen.
Kevin Feige
Unpacking Feige’s quote (and the implications from the original article), it’s clear that the plan is NOT to retell the origin story of the team again. Marvel Studios took the same approach when introducing Spider-Man into the MCU, choosing to sprinkle in jsut enough info about how Peter Parker became Spidey via dialogue as opposed to spending an act or two of a film on it. Does this mean that the Fantastic Four might, as Spidey did before them, enter the MCU in another film? Rumors and speculation have identified Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania as a potential entry point for the team, but without casting decisions for the team having been made, the clock is ticking on that as the Ant-Man threequel hits theaters in February.
Whatever the plan, it’s encouraging to know that Feige understands the gravity of this film and that Marvel Studios MUST take great care to set it apart from Fox’s less-than-successful films. As of now, all eyes are on D23, September 9-11th in Anaheim, as a potential time and place for Feige to trot out a director and cast. With less than two months to go until the event, fans are holding out hope that Feige can solve everything.
Source: THR
