For a studio that has been a box office stalwart for the last two decades, 2025 has undoubtedly been a shaky year for Marvel Studios. Fantastic Four: First Steps, Marvel’s third entry of 2025, had a hefty load of expectations placed on its shoulders. Not only did it have to follow up two underperforming films Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts*, First Steps also had to repair the legacy of the Fantastic Four series after the decidedly average 2000s movies and the disastrous mess of 2015’s Fant4stic. Added to this, the growing discourse online of Pedro Pascal appearing in nearly every movie out this summer (I’m just waiting for a film starring him, Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler and Glen Powell), and Marvel’s reliance on this film to garner hype for the next Avengers movie coming in 2026, the rocky box office performance for the new Fantastic Four was perhaps inevitable.

Let’s get this straight: First Steps is not bringing Marvel back to the ascendant position it previously held, because of a flurry of disparate Disney+ shows and a disconnect between its recent major releases. Nonetheless, First Steps is an entertaining film, combining the broader scope of more recent MCU offerings like Shang-Chi, the on-point production design of Loki, and grounding the film in the family dynamic of the team by centring the Reed ‘Mr Fantastic’ Richards (Pedro Pascal) and his relationship with his wife Sue ‘The Invisible Woman’ Storm - played by Vanessa Kirby. A high-stakes chase sequence is amplified by Sue going into labour, with Reed having to split his time between flying the Four’s spaceship and helping his wife. Now that’s couple goals. By centring on a familial dynamic, First Steps is one of the most emotional Marvel films, focusing on an oft-forgotten core of some of Marvel’s best characters.

“First Steps is not bringing Marvel back to the ascendant position it previously held”

Speaking of Reed Richards, I found Pascal’s performance thoroughly entertaining and perhaps the most unexpectedly compelling of the film. Not only did I believe he was this genius scientist, breaking boundaries in astrophysics, but the scenes with Reed and his newborn child, Franklin, felt emotional in a way Marvel films have been lacking. Pascal convincingly played the role of an insecure, worried father and a flawed hero at the same time, creating one of the most interesting protagonists in the MCU. The rest of the cast, despite their best efforts, often felt second fiddle to Pascal and Kirby, especially Ebon Mass-Bacharach’s Ben Grimm (The Thing) who had a shallow, forced, romantic side plot.

It’s worth noting that the different tone of First Steps, one that feels unique in the wider MCU, serves as a fresh change to the usual nondescript atmosphere of Marvel films. In part, this is due to the film’s setting in an alternative retro-futuristic universe of the 1960s, where flying cars, space travel, and teleportation coexist with Mary Quant mini-skirts, ACME-esque home appliances, and a version of The Ed Sullivan Show (sans The Beatles). As previously mentioned, the props and visual design resemble those on the Loki TV series, with Loki’s production designer, Kasra Farahani, also working on this film. By giving First Steps a distinct visual identity, Marvel has differentiated this film from its previous releases as it tries to reshape audience perceptions of itself.

“More broadly, superhero films as a whole seem to have shaken off the shackles of grittier realism”

More broadly, superhero films as a whole appear to have shed the shackles of grittier realism. In fact, the message and tone of recent films like First Steps, Superman and Thunderbolts* are far more hopeful and less cynical than previous superhero flicks. Thunderbolts* focused on the importance of kindness, while Director James Gunn has stated that his take on Superman highlights concepts of justice and truth. First Steps emphasises these positive themes in its core family dynamic, and coupled with the whole world joining together to aid the defeat of Galactus (as corny as that may be), ultimately setting it apart from its darker predecessors.

With recent newspaper headlines putting The Onion to shame, audiences may now want to escape the chaos of our everyday lives, shunning realism that, for some, may hit too close to home. Additionally, the last 20 years of superhero films have been darker, true-to-life adaptations of comic book heroes. After such a long time, the tastes of audiences inevitably change.

The Dark Knight formula has been revisited time and again. With declining box office figures for both Marvel and DC in the 2020s, First Steps is the natural progression towards a lighter, more comic-accurate style of superhero films. First Steps is not a dramatic reinvention of the superhero film, but I came away entertained and positively excited in a way I’ve not felt from a Marvel movie in a long time. It was, in all, a pretty fantastic film. Say that again…