Fantastic Four: First Steps poster seems to have been made with AI

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A new poster for Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps seems to have been made with the help of AI. More on it below.


Disney and Marvel today unveiled the first trailer for Matt Shankman’s Fantastic Four: First Steps which launches in a cinema near you this July.

Alongside it? A new poster was also released, for a film thatā€™s costing a comfortable nine figures to make. Funded by Disney, one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world.

A closer inspection of the poster though reveals that somethingā€™s off. Take a look for yourself: 

marvel fantastic four poster
Credit: Marvel

Specifically, the man waving the bigger Fantastic Four flag seems to only have three fingers and a thumb. The detail was noticed by an eagle-eyed X/Twitter user. Thatā€™s not all, either: look at this Bluesky post, and more details are very much awry.

The assumption is that Disney ā€“ and correct us if weā€™re wrong ā€“ didn’t actually go out of their way to find someone with such an impairment. Instead, sigh, the poster was made with AI and such a detail slipped through.

Or maybe we’re completely wrong and we’re actually looking at a mutant in a nice little reference to the X-Men but we highly doubt that. It wouldnā€™t explain the other anomalies.

Disney is a company with billions in the bank, that can easily pay real artists for their work. Work that tends not to include missing fingers. To see one of the biggest releases of the year relying on AI slop, trained on the creative work of people worrying about their futures, leaves an incredibly sour taste.

Is that what itā€™s all being reduced to? Marvel also has form with this sort of thing; in 2023, the company used AI to produce the opening credits sequence for its Disney+ series, Secret Invasion.

AI continues to be a hotly discussed topic and recent films such as The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s Oscar hopeful, have used it to polish off the finished movie. Yet Nicolas Cage recently spoke out against AI, saying “Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us. That is a dead end if an actor lets one AI robot manipulate his or her performance even a little bit, an inch will eventually become a mile and all integrity, purity and truth of art will be replaced by financial interests only.”

We’d have to agree with Cage, who also encouraged us to stay protected against AI’s meddling with “your authentic and honest expressions.”

Hopefully, Disney can clarify this and assure the world itā€™s all deliberate. Because otherwise, a company that can afford to know and do better, hasnā€™t.

Fantastic Four AI poster
With thanks to John Moore
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