'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' CinemaCon Footage Reveals News Bump And Bump News

It’s gonna be a really good show

The trailer for Tron: Ares obviously wasn’t the only part of Disney’s CinemaCon presentation. There were new Lilo & Stitch and Freakier Friday clips, some Elio, Avatar: Fire and Ash, the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere with a look at Jeremy Allen White in the role and Ella McCay, Simpsons co-creator James L. Brooks’s first directorial effort since Jack Nicholson’s last film How Do You Know all the way back in 2010. But of course, Marvel Studios had its presence too in it all. A good section for Thunderbolts* as star David Harbour drove his castmates, and a significant one for July’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, starring Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing, which featured new revealing footage.

The footage opens up at a talk show, The Ted Gilbert Show, heavily inspired by The Ed Sullivan Show and befitting the ‘60s era aesthetic of the world. The talk show host that completes a joke worthy of the H.M.S. Pinafore is played by Sherlock co-creator and star Mark Gatiss. It is here where Gilbert recounts them getting their powers, the outer space adventure, getting hit by cosmic rays, changing them forever in most fantastic of ways. Turns out posed stand that made for a popular image from the first trailer is from this appearance. Their popularity with the public is showcased too, with cheering crowds full of children. Ben, Johnny, and Sue are seen in action, powers on display, conspicuously hiding Reed’s. Domestic life highlights include more of H.E.R.B.I.E. and Ben cooking together as Reed and Sue show up late, earning a scolding by Johnny, but it turns out, as long suspected, Sue is pregnant. Johnny heaps congratulations and praise on his sister as he jokes to Reed he’ll be an awful dad. For the first time, fans got a look at Julia Garner’s Shalla-Bal Silver Surfer, as in all her gleaming, metallic glory, she declares “Your planet is now marked for death”. Galactus’s shadow continues to tower, even as a little girl stops to pick up an action figure of The Thing from the ground she dropped it on.

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In addition to his Sherlock work, Gatiss is probably best known for his writing surrounding Doctor Who, writing nine episodes across the first ten revival series, as well as the 2013 docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time starring David Bradley as William Hartnell as the film chronicled the early days of the series’s production. His first episode was the revival’s third “The Unquiet Dead”, and would be followed by “The Idiot's Lantern," an appearance as Professor Lazarus in “The Lazarus Experiment”, "Victory of the Daleks", "Night Terrors", "Cold War", "The Crimson Horror", "Robot of Sherwood" "Sleep No More", and "Empress of Mars" topped off by an appearance as Captain Archibald Lethbridge-Stewart in the 2017 Christmas episode “Twice Upon a Time”, the Twelfth Doctor’s regeneration episode and Steven Moffat’s last as showrunner. Previous Doctor Who alums in the Marvel Cinematic Universe include Christopher Eccleston as Malekith in Thor: The Dark World, David Tennant as Kilgrave aka Purple Man in Jessica Jones, Jenna Coleman in Captain America: The First Avenger, and Karen Gillan as Nebula, who has racked up six film appearances.

Director Matt Shakman told Empire that the film is looking to evoke the optimistic spirit that the 1950s and 1960s had, specifically “This is very much about the spirit of the Space Race. It's about JFK and optimism. It’s imagining these four going into space instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. This idea is that they are the most famous people in America, because they’re adventurers, explorers, astronauts — not because they're superheroes. And they come back and they're superheroes on top of it. But primarily they're astronauts, they're family.” Having come from WandaVision, where Wanda’s Hex initially placed the people of Westview in a way that mimicked television of those decades before moving on to later decades’ styles, he was keen to make the film feel like it came from that time. “I really wanted to go with as grounded a version of space as possible,” he says. “So, no wormholes. Their tech is very much retro-future, but it's also booster rockets. It’s a combination of Marvel and Apollo 11.”

It was a philosophy that extended to the production of the film. “I really wanted it to feel like it was made in 1965, the way Stanley Kubrick would have made it…within reason.” He put emphasis on practical sets and props, such as a 14-foot-tall spaceship miniature, like Kubrick’s use of miniatures on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Shakman and his team have “used old lenses, and taken an approach to filmmaking that feels more of the time. Of course, we still have a lot of CG.” The Fantastic Four: First Steps releases in theaters on July 25.

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Sources: IGN, Empire