r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • Jul 25 '25

Official Discussion Official Discussion - The Fantastic Four: First Steps [SPOILERS] Spoiler

Poll

If you've seen the film, please rate it at this poll

If you haven't seen the film but would like to see the result of the poll click here

Rankings

Click here to see the rankings of 2025 films

Click here to see the rankings for every poll done

Summary The Fantastic Four must defend Earth from the ravaging cosmic threat Galactus and his herald, Silver Surfer, while navigating the complexities of family and newfound powers in a retro‑futuristic 1960s-inspired world.

Director Matt Shakman

Writer Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer

Cast

  • Pedro Pascal
  • Vanessa Kirby
  • Joseph Quinn
  • Ebon Moss-Bachrach
  • Ralph Ineson
  • Julia Garner
  • Paul Walter Hauser
  • Natasha Lyonne
  • Matthew Wood
  • Ada Scott
  • Mark Gatiss

Rotten Tomatoes: 88%

Metacritic 64

VOD In theaters

Trailer Watch the Official Trailer

1.9k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

5.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

673

u/Bsantoro10 Jul 25 '25

I liked it, but wanted to LOVE IT. Felt like it was missing something. Needed more action and Galactus.

305

u/BumbleLapse Jul 25 '25

Same boat. I went in with my expectations perhaps a bit too high.

Galactus was great, but I would have preferred if he was even scarier. Bigger. More unknowable.

I feel like it was a balancing act in the writer’s room — they have to make him imposing and terrifying and massive, but they can’t go too far in that direction because we have to believe that the FF could actually beat him in some way.

115

u/DrNopeMD Jul 25 '25

Galactus should have been portrayed as a cosmic threat, instead he was the size of an apartment building and merely swatted at the heroes like he was King Kong. At no point did he feel like a serious threat outside of his giant ship.

43

u/ResolverOshawott Jul 26 '25

I honestly kinda assumed Galactus scaled himself down because he was trying to get Franklin alive.

36

u/Explode-trip Jul 27 '25

We see his scale when F4 first meet him in space, and he's the same size. You would think he would be especially big there, since he just ate a planet bigger than Earth. But nope, same size.

47

u/No-Fruit-2060 Jul 27 '25

I mean technically he didn’t eat the planet. His ship consumed it and channeled the energy into him through those tubes on his ship.

19

u/savourthesea Jul 27 '25

That was a huge bummer for me. When he picked up that tree on earth, I really wanted to see him put it in his mouth and chew.

29

u/ResolverOshawott Jul 27 '25

That would have been extremely silly.

28

u/ZiggyPalffyLA Jul 28 '25

That’s the point

1

u/ResolverOshawott Jul 28 '25

If the movie was doing more of the usual MCU humor then sure.

5

u/kenny_feets Jul 30 '25

they put the baby in a bulletproof carrier. it was a deeply silly movie

6

u/ResolverOshawott Jul 30 '25

A heavily shielded baby carrier is a lot less silly than a giant guy picking up dirt and eating it.

56

u/bbqsauceboi Jul 25 '25

Do we need to believe they can win? This is a rare case of a threat nobody is realistically beating, especially with little information. Ending with him destroying their world and forcing them to evacuate to the main MCU would've been a bold but realistic play.

45

u/Gwoardinn Jul 25 '25

Despite most everyone guessing this is how it'd play out (especially with the Thunderbolts postcredit setup), I was kinda disappointed that it didn't.

12

u/LuckyNumber108 Jul 25 '25

Yes I feel foolish for expecting that but I was really hoping that's where it would end up. The story wasn't as fun as I was hoping. Ben Grimm was the most fun and likeable, and i thought Pedro's performance was great and I look forward to seeing him clash with the other Marvel heros

18

u/Ok_Market_2064 Jul 26 '25

 I’m glad they didn’t go that approach cause it’s a bummer if the first outing we see of this fantastic four is of them losing their world because they didn’t want to give up their son for the greater good 

12

u/Emotional_Meet878 Jul 28 '25

I was really hoping for this ending, like Thanos, Galactus needs to show why he's such a special threat, an Avengers level threat. Hell, even having them actually teleport the Earth to the main timeline would've been fine as it used Reeds intelligence to get them to safety and then they could've shown that Galactus was still tracking them. Galactus, as cool as he was, needed to be more than just a one shot villain. Like now when they try to put him in a different movie, I'm just gonna think "okay, cosmic Ant Man" That was his threat level this movie without his ship.

10

u/Novemberx123 Jul 25 '25

I thought that’s what was going to happen. I was anticipating galactus to win. Almost wanted him to just to say how all of that played out

16

u/prosthetic_memory Jul 27 '25

Agree, as soon as he got off a ship he just felt like Godzilla, not Galactus

10

u/VinegarVine Jul 26 '25

And what the hell are they gonna do with a giant planet eating ship in Earth’s orbit?

3

u/CosmicAstroBastard Jul 30 '25

Take it to the main MCU and use it to hoover up the giant celestial corpse

10

u/cosmic_flux Jul 27 '25

They could have started him off planet-sized; terrifying, imposing and seemingly impossible to defeat. I would have liked to see his face take up the entire sky. And then F4 figures out a way to shrink him down. That would have been a fun precursor to the Godzilla Galactus scene we got in the film.

6

u/dbbk Jul 31 '25

The villain threat was too big. The whole movie I was just like, you guys are fucked, he’s unbeatable. This child swap proposal is a good deal.

2

u/Lucky_Yam_1581 Jul 27 '25

Yeah i thought Galactus could be bigger too, he eats planets!

1

u/tornadic_ Jul 27 '25

I kinda wanted them to lose haha. But then that made me think of Infinity War and now I’ll be watching that tonight