A Fantastic Four movie has been tried before—at least three times, actually—but now Marvel Studios is giving the characters a fourth shot at the big screen, announcing Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the quartet of superheroes renowned as the comic book universe’s “first family.”

After months, if not years, of rumor and guesswork from fans, the company finally confirmed the casting with an illustration of the actors as their characters in a Valentine’s Day post on Instagram. Pascal, the star of The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, will play paterfamilias Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mister Fantastic, who has the power to stretch and bend his body in impossible ways. Kirby, recently of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon but previously known for The Crown and the Mission: Impossible movies, will be the see-through scientist Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman.

Quinn, the breakout of season four of Stranger Things as the brave metalhead Eddie Munson, will take on the role of Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm, the high-flying Human Torch. And Moss-Bachrach, the scene-stealing cousin Richie on The Bear, will be Ben Grimm, the orange-rock brawler known as The Thing who is fond of announcing: “It’s clobberin‘ time!” (That’s his human form in the portrait behind his stony alter ego below.)

The new Fantastic Four film will be directed by WandaVision producer-director Matt Shakman, who picked up the project after Jon Watts, director of the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, stepped back in 2022. Watts had been announced as the filmmaker by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige in 2020, so fans of the series have had their hopes rising and falling for several years now. 

A Marvel representative confirmed to Vanity Fair that screenwriting duo Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer wrote the script for this adaptation, while Josh Friedman, a cowriter of James Cameron’s Avatar sequels, is currently doing a pass on the latest version. 

But even though the guessing game around the cast is over, there’s still a much bigger question: Can a Fantastic Four movie finally be an unqualified success? Marvel Studios recovered the cinematic rights to the characters after parent company Disney merged in 2019 with rival studio 20th Century Fox, which had previously made two different attempts at establishing a franchise in 2005 and 2015. Both those efforts underwhelmed and ultimately stagnated.

Those weren’t even the first big-screen attempts. In the early 1990s, B movie maestro Roger Corman helped produce an ultra-cheap adaptation that was never officially released (except as a bootleg) in part—the legend goes—to help the rights-holders fulfill the terms of his contract and hang on to the license a bit longer. “[Bernd Eichinger] had an option to produce The Fantastic Four on a 30 million dollar budget, but the option was going to expire on December 31st and he didn’t have the 30 million dollars,” Corman told the KPCC radio show Off-Ramp. “So he came to me and said, ‘Roger, I’ve got this 30 million dollar picture. Could you make it for 1 million dollars?’ I said, ‘We can do a pretty good job, I think, for a million dollars.’”

Except, not really. The movie has since achieved cult status, mainly for its comically crude visual effects and slapdash production values. “Those were some of the compromises we had to make in order to trim 29 million dollars off the budget,” Corman joked in that 2015 interview. That’s the year a documentary was released about the film’s notorious creation, appropriately named after Doctor Doom, the primary Fantastic Four villain: Doomed!: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four.

The 2005 Fantastic Four movie was perhaps the most successful. It starred Ioan Gruffudd as Mister Fantastic, Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman,  Michael Chiklis as The Thing, and future Captain America Chris Evans as the Human Torch. Directed by Barbershop filmmaker Tim Story, it earned over $333 million at the global box office and cost about $100 million to make, a tidy profit for 20th Century Fox that showed the powerful draw of the classic comic book characters.

Reviews were poor, however, and it stands today with a 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics. A 2007 sequel, The Rise of the Silver Surfer, fared a little better (it has a score of 38%), and also earned $301 million worldwide, but cost $130 million. The tapering of the audience suggested diminishing interest, and Fox did not proceed with a third installment.

“I’m pretty sure we won’t do one. I’m assuming that one is a closed book,” Evans told MTV News in 2008, two years before he signed on to play Captain America. “We had all planned on doing [another] one but if there were going to be a third I think a week after the second one was released we would have heard.”

Fox ordered a reboot in 2015, directed by Chronicle filmmaker Josh Trank and starring Miles Teller as Mister Fantastic, Kate Mara as the Invisible Woman, Jamie Bell as The Thing, and future Black Panther antagonist Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch. But the film became an unmitigated disaster that poisoned the franchise for another decade to come.

Trank and Fox executives repeatedly clashed during the production, and the final cut was not under Trank’s supervision, leading to one of the most complicated and troubled backstories in recent blockbuster history. When the film debuted, Trank tweeted his scorn for the finished product: “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though,” he wrote.

After he opened fire on his own film, the studio hit back hard, alleging erratic and uncooperative behavior on his part. Trank countered that he had been fighting for the creative integrity of the film. Ironically, the new cast announcement from Marvel Studios includes an image of the squad’s in-house robot H.E.R.B.I.E., which was one of the characters Trank wanted to include but was reportedly blocked by the studio from featuring. They also rejected his flying Fantasticar and other ideas pulled from the comic books.

The reviews were catastrophic, amounting to a score of 9% on Rotten Tomatoes. The box office returns were surprisingly…okay. It earned $167 million globally, but that was about half of what its predecessors did a decade ago. There was some half-hearted talk of a sequel, minus Trank, but nothing ever moved forward. 

About a year afterward, the film’s Doctor Doom, Toby Kebbell, spoke up in support of the film’s exiled director, who had been in line to direct a Boba Fett movie for Lucasfilm before the immolation of Fantastic Four scorched everything around him. “I tell you, the honest truth is [Trank] did cut a great film that you’ll never see,” Kebbell told the Daily Beast. “That is a shame. A much darker version, and you’ll never see it.”

When Disney acquired Fox, fans welcomed the return of Fantastic Four to the Marvel Studios fold. Casting rumors constantly popped up on social media, to the point that Marvel eventually took notice. John Krasinski was a frequent fan favorite for Reed Richards, and Marvel Studios eventually cast him as an alternate universe version of the character in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Characters can have different appearances, histories, and fates in varying dimensions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in case you’re wondering how that allows Pascal to take on the role. 

Some have argued that Disney has already released the ideal Fantastic Four movie with Pixar’s 2004 animated classic The Incredibles since the family of that adventure features variations on most of the powers of the iconic Marvel quartet: stretchiness, invisibility, strength, and heat-generating velocity.

They were an actual family of a mother, father, and two kids (plus Jack-Jack), and Marvel has always emphasized the closeness of the characters and made the point that the Fantastic Four is a “family” rather than a mere “team.” They were even nicknamed “Marvel’s first family,” in part because their debut in November 1961 heralded a new era in the comic book company’s storytelling. Writer Stan Lee and artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko joined forces to create the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and a litany of other now cherished characters. 

In the preface to a 1979 paperback collection of classic Fantastic Four comics, Lee wrote effusively about their role in clearing a path for the legendary stories to come. “Unless you just arrived on the space shuttle from Mars, or have never been into the exotically erudite world of comic books, you must surely be aware that the gold ol‘ F.F. was the very first production of the Marvel Age of Comics,” Lee wrote. “That’s why I kinda feel like I’m writing about the invention of the wheel, or the discovery of fire. We’re talking about the very beginning, about the quasi-classical characters who laid the foundation, who paved the way, who greased the skids, who set the style for the entire body of myths which your bright-eyed little bullpen was later to produce.”

Lee called the Fantastic Four “the fabulous framework on which the whole Marvel edifice was built”—but onscreen, at least, it’s gone the opposite way. When a Marvel Studios Fantastic Four arrives in 2025, it will be after a rough and tumble journey, to say the least.