There are a lot of expectations placed on the MCU version of the Fantastic Four. If the new take on the loving yet dysfunctional found family is to succeed, however, it needs to differentiate itself from the two previous big screen takes on the property. One way to do that would be to make sure the core group is made up entirely of diverse actors.
Such a decision would allow the MCU Fantastic Four movie to revolve not just around the foursome’s separation from the world at large but add an element of trying to understand each other that traditional stories couldn’t achieve. This could easily be explored alongside the character’s attempts at learning and controlling their powers, which in the comics are the result of exposure to cosmic rays during a mission to outer space.
Considering the long and storied history of the Fantastic Four, a fully diverse take could only be a good thing. The setup for these characters, after all, finds four people gaining some powers they can’t control, and has them basically needing to hole up and try to figure out not just what they can do, but what they want to do. This would be a much more interesting story if their perspectives on whether to even become a superhero team are framed in a way that goes beyond the usual patriotism or heroism angle.
That's especially true considering that the main problem with this property is basically that fans have too much to compare it to, a little like Spider-Man. There have been two different Fantastic Four iterations in recent memory, with one of them starring the man who would go on to become Captain America, Chris Evans, and the other, more forgettable one, starring Killmonger himself, Michael B. Jordan.
Those aren’t even the only two attempts to bring the Fantastic Four to the big screen, there was a previous one, in the mid-90s, a movie that was never released in theaters or on home video. This adaptation is widely understood to have been made just because Constantin Film owned the film rights and would have lost them had it failed to produce a movie. Better to make a bad movie no one was ever going to watch than to lose the possibility of ever making a good one, was the thinking.
Adaptation number two, however, would have to wait till 2005. It featured a Latina actress – Jessica Alba – as Sue Storm, but as a white Latina, it’s hard to argue Alba was an attempt at diversity on the part of the people in charge. If anything, Alba was hired because she was one of the biggest names in Hollywood in the early 2000s, and the adaptation was meant to usher in an era of superheroes. It didn’t quite work, though the movie did well enough to spawn a sequel, in 2007, featuring the same cast.
Fans didn’t have to wait long for another crack at this story. 2015 brought another reboot, this time with Michael B. Jordan playing Johnny Storm, but three white actors in the other main roles, and not enough attention paid in the actual movie to the fact that Johnny’s experience as a Black man made him even more of an outcast. This leads to the present, where thanks to the 2019 Disney acquisition of 20th Century Fox, the film rights for Fantastic Four are back in Disney’s hands, and a new Fantastic Four movie has been confirmed, though no casting has yet been announced.
This means there’s still time for the MCU to do something other than play it safe in this regard, something which could, in turn, end up being as impactful as these characters were when they were first introduced. After all, the foursome, who debuted in Fantastic Four #1 in 1961 was at the forefront of a new age of realism in comics and were the first superhero team created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.
Even then, the Fantastic Four comic run stood apart from other comics by portraying these heroes as flawed characters. They loved each other and often behaved as a family, but that also meant they squabbled, got into fights, held grudges, and perhaps more importantly, cared very little about anonymity or secret identities.
In many respects, fans are living in a golden age of superheroes, and the things that made the Fantastic Four stand out back when they debuted are things the superhero genre does well in general, and Marvel has excelled at. Tony Stark famously outed himself as Iron Man, and the Avengers are basically the definition of found family with some issues to sort through.
So, if the MCU wants to do something different with the Fantastic Four, they should strive to bring some much-needed diversity into the MCU. And this shouldn't just extend to casting diverse actors but hiring the right writers and directors to make the story they’re trying to tell feel authentic. That’s how to make the Fantastic Four truly stand out.