Expect Johnny and Sue Storm to feel a bit updated when “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” hits theaters.
With a little over three months to go before the movie premieres, stars Joseph Quinn and Vanessa Kirby broke down how they updated their classic characters. For Quinn, it was about finding what made him interesting to a modern audience.
“Myself and [Marvel Studios boss] Kevin [Feige] were speaking about previous iterations of him and where we are culturally,” he told Entertainment Weekly on Thursday. “He was branded as this womanizing, devil-may-care guy, but is that sexy these days? I don’t think so. This version of Johnny is less callous with other people’s feelings.”
Meanwhile, when Kirby took on the Invisible Woman, she went into it looking to figure out how to make her feel like less of a “doormat” than if she was actually in the 1960s.
“If you played an exact ’60s Sue today, everyone would think she was a bit of a doormat,” Kirby said. “So figuring out how to capture the essence of what she represented to each generation, where the gender politics were different, and embody that today, was one of the greatest joys of this.”
“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” is the first crack at adapting Marvel’s First Family into the MCU. The film is set in a retro-futuristic 1960s on a different Earth than the majority of Marvel’s films have taken place. Because of that, director Matt Shakman – who also was involved in the Disney+ series “WandaVision” – said the film feels much more standalone than other MCU properties do.
“We are our own universe, which is wonderful and liberating,” the filmmaker previously told Empire of the blockbuster, which takes place in a different reality than the rest of Marvel‘s movies and TV shows. “There’s really no [other] superheroes. There’s no Easter eggs. There’s no running into Iron Man or whatever. They’re it in this universe. I love the interconnected Marvel Universe, but we get to do something so new and so different.”
He continued: “This is very much about the spirit of the Space Race. It’s about JFK and optimism. It’s imagining these four going into space instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. This idea is that they are the most famous people in America because they’re adventurers, explorers, astronauts — not because they’re superheroes. And they come back and they’re superheroes on top of it. But primarily they’re astronauts, they’re family.”
“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” hits theaters July 25.
