Marvel’s First Family launches back onto the big screen this week with The Fantastic Four: First Steps – a retro-futuristic Jack Kirby-inspired endeavor that officially brings this pioneering comic book supergroup into the MCU. This isn’t the first Fantastic Four movie, of course; heck, it isn’t even the first Fantastic Four movie to feature Silver Surfer and Galactus as its villains. But it does, however, look like it will be the first FF flick to deliver the goods.
With Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben once again clobberin’ their way into our hearts, we’ve decided to rank the four (yes, four) Fantastic Four movies that came before this.
Where will The Fantastic Four: First Steps ultimately rank on this list? Well, we’ll need to give that a little bit of time, so that everyone gets a chance to see it and also to sidestep any possible recency bias. We do know that our reviewer, Clint Gage, gave the film a 7 out of 10, saying it’s a “family dramedy that only stops working when it tries to be too much of a superhero movie.”
For now though, we’ll dip into the past and list these suckers from terrible to “it’s fine.” Here is our official ranking of the previous Fantastic Four flicks!
4. Fantastic Four (2015)
Josh Trank’s abysmal Fantastic Four movie was naturally going to come in dead last. It’s a colossal misstep on just about every level, swapping out the family dynamic and cosmic camaraderie elements for humorless sci-fi slog. It all feels like stoic strangers sharing a nightmare, tweaking so much of the standard formula that it barely feels recognizable as a Fantastic Four movie. Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell starred in a catastrophe that Trank himself even disavows, claiming that his version, a better version, of the film was buried by Fox, who then made their own theatrical cut. We’ll have to take his word for it, but consider that just about anything would be better than this film.
3. The Fantastic Four (1994)
Even though most everyone involved was tricked into thinking this movie would get a theatrical release, and even though indie cinema icon Roger Corman made it on a nothing budget, it’s still an earnest, honest Fantastic Four movie. So it just so happens that an impressively faithful-to-the-material Fantastic flick, which was fated to be shelved, came about because producer Bernd Eichinger needed to make a movie to retain the superhero rights. Everyone looks the part down to their hairstyles; we even got the best, or at least most accurate, Dr. Doom to date. So aside from rubber costumes and shoddy effects, this film is eons better than the $120 million dollar fiasco listed at number four.
It’s worth noting that the actors from this movie — Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underwood, and Michael Bailey Smith — all have small roles in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
2. Fantastic Four (2005)
The 2005 Tim Story Fantastic Four film is…fine. It gets the quartet right as characters for the most part and offers up a serviceable full-costumed Dr. Doom, albeit with a villain arc that feels very Norman Osborn-esque from 2002’s Spider-Man. It’s an origin story that spends two-thirds of the movie dealing with the Four’s origin, though to be fair, no one was necessarily burned out on origins back in 2005 when Marvel franchises like Spider-Man and X-Men were still shiny and new. Where the movie is most lacking is in the third act, which falls flat as a climactic clash between our heroes and a rather low-blood sugar Doom. There’s nothing drastically wrong about this movie, even with its tweaks, but it’s also a rather unexciting outing. Still, it’s because this movie was a modest hit that we actually had, briefly, a Fantastic Four franchise.
1. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)
Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, and Michael Chiklis returned for this souped-up sequel, which allowed the Fantastic Four to exist as public-facing celebrity superheroes without having a lengthy origin story to bog things down. Aside from the new Phase 6 movie coming out, this is the only other Fantastic Four movie where we just get dropped into a lived-in FF universe where our heroes are beloved global champions. Sure, Rise of the Silver Surfer has Reed doing a silly, stretchy dance at his bachelor party, and it wasn’t confident enough to give us Galactus as Galactus (he appears as a cloud, which was the way superhero movies solved adversaries for a long time – see also: Green Lantern, Dr. Strange, the Loki series, etc.), but it was also a better team adventure than the first film, even borrowing a bit from Superman II by having Dr. Doom remain as a secondary antagonist to the new cosmic threat.
Which is your favorite past Fantastic Four movie? Let us know down below…
Matt Fowler is a freelance entertainment writer/critic, covering TV news, reviews, interviews and features on IGN for 17+ years.
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