Monterey Jack wrote: Fri Jul 25, 2025 9:08 pm 6/10



Hooray, it's...resoundingly adequate! While it's easily the "best" FF movie to date, clearing the low bar of the Roger Corman cheapie, the pair of lame-assed 2000s Fox entries and Fan4stic is not exactly high praise. It's an easier sit than the last two MCU movies that came out this year, but you can see the scars of last-minute nipping and tucking all over it. It's like a highlights reel of a previous movie we never got to see. Hey, I'm Captain Short-Assed Movies, but this movie just moves from plot peak to plot peak, without any pesky valleys of character development that would have given them shape. You know a movie's flailing when it opens with a TV montage of fun action sequence fragments that you wish you could have seen in full (the exact same flaw of Fan4stic). I know that the recent Superman also eschewed doing a full origin retelling, but that was a film that at least gave us some downtime of characters interacting with each other, but here there's almost no beats of the characters utilizing their powers in relatable or entertaining ways (I did enjoy Sue Storm rendering her belly transparent so that Reed Richards could take a look at his unborn son, which had kind of a warm, Innerspace vibe), and the attempts to generate some flirtation sparks between Johnny Storm and a gender-swapped Silver Surfer sputter out because they have so few interactions in the film, rendering a "heroic sacrifice" moment late in the proceedings dramatically inert.

The movie also looks wan and washed-out, with none of the colorful pop a 1960s (even an alternate universe '60s) period piece should possess. I would have preferred this much more had it been specifically set in "our" 1960s, but that probably would have interfered too much with MCU continuity (which no one cares about or can follow anymore anyways). Galactus' touchdown in New York has an enjoyable Toho scale to it, and there's a mildly emotional, well-earned dramatic beat at the climax, but overall this is a movie that, like far too many MCU movies, serves just to move chess pieces around and set up the next chapter. It's an easy enough sit, and I liked Joseph Quinn's performance as Johnny Storm (they should have cast him as a young Tony Stark in a full reboot of the franchise, though, as he has such a 1980s RDJ quality to him).

SUNDAY AM: Refresh for more….Ok, ok, ok, so Marvel Studios/Disney‘s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is coming in lighter at $118M after a -42% slide on Saturday against Friday/previews for what was $33.3M.

That’s a steep Friday/previews to Saturday decline, which indicates the movie was front-loaded. Fantastic Four‘s fall is sharper than Superman (-33%), Thunderbolts* (-22%), Deadpool & Wolverine (-36%), and Captain America: Brave New World (-32%).

AndyDursin wrote: Fri Jun 06, 2025 4:24 pm Just like listening to Williams' SUPERMAN and Elfman's BATMAN for the first time.