As The Fantastic Four nears production, Marvel’s Kevin Feige has addressed some of the rumours regarding the film.
Marvel Studios has launched an official podcast (creatively titled The Official Marvel Podcast) and the studio’s chief Kevin Feige pops up in the first episode to seemingly confirm a suspicion that fans have been harbouring for a long time regarding the setting of the soon-to-shoot adaptation of The Fantastic Four.
Kevin Feige revealed that the film will officially start production at the end of July, the day after San Diego Comic Con. Yep, that probably means that the film’s stars will be arriving in Hall H to be revealed in front of a rather excited audience before jetting off to wherever the film’s shooting.
The stars in question are Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm. Then there’s Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer and Paul Walter Hauser in an unspecified role.
We haven’t heard any complaints about casting and with WandaVision’s Matt Shakman directing a script by Josh Friedman and Jeff Kaplan, things look set up to create a decent movie. Marvel’s First Family is said to be fighting the villain Galactus in the latest interpretation of the comics. Word was that Javier Bardem or perhaps Ralph Ineson would be playing the cosmic despot, though we’re still waiting for confirmation on that bit.
Read more: Marvel’s Fantastic Four | Ralph Ineson will reportedly play Galactus
Back to Feige, though. Rumours have swirled for some time that The Fantastic Four would be set in 1960s New York, echoing the classic Silver Age setting of the original comic books. Feige has confirmed that these rumours are accurate – kind of.
“It’s a period [piece],” says Feige, “and there’s another piece of art we released with Johnny Storm flying in the air and making a 4 symbol, and there was a cityscape in the corner of that image, and there were a lot of smart people who noticed that that cityscape didn’t exactly look like the New York we know and the New York that existed in the 60s in our world. And so those are smart observations, I’ll say.”
That seems to confirm that the film will take place in a version of 1960s New York, just not our own. That means more multiverse shenanigans which might invoke an eye roll from some fans who are bored with this storytelling exploit.
We would say though, if it gives Marvel the narrative latitude to tell a Fantastic Four story in that original 1960s setting then hopefully that will prove to be an excellent direction. It’ll give us characters we love in a setting we haven’t seen before and one that Marvel’s First Family are inextricably connected to because of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s wonderful comic books.
By the sounds of it, expect more news next month…
