Retro Easter Egg Hunt: “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” Trailer Breakdown

By now, you’ve seen the trailer for director Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, probably the most eagerly-anticipated MCU film of the year, given how long the Core Four have been gone. The Fantastic Four are, in fact, making their Marvel Cinematic Universe debut since that now ancient acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney way back in 2019. That acquisition gave Disney the film rights to Deadpool (hello, Deadpool & Wolverine), the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four, and more.

Shakman’s film, due this July 25, is a big deal to both Marvel fans and Fantastic Four aficionados, as they represent Marvel’s First Family, created by Marvel Comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1961, ushering in a new level of realism to the comics medium. Sure, we’re still talking about characters that can catch fire and fly, become invisible, stretch their bodies to nearly any length or into shape, and are, well, a rock monster, but the Fantastic Four are Marvel’s Royal Family.

The Core Four are played by Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/The Thing). The trailer revealed the film’s style and setting in a retrofuturistic 1960s New York City that might not be the same New York City we’ve seen so many times in previous MCU films.

The trailer hints at how these four good friends were, at one point, regular astronauts, but after a cosmic mishap during a mission, they returned to Earth with superpowers and became the Fantastic Four. In First Steps, we know they’ll eventually tangle with a galactic brute appropriately named Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a world-eating supervillain who we spied at the end of the trailer. We did not see Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer, however, Galactus’s mercury-quick herald, but we know she’s in the film.

Let’s take a quick tour of what we saw, including making one very big assumption about a mystery character played by John Malkovich:

Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic

We got a sense of just how smart Reed Richards is in the trailer—the above shot is cinematic shorthand for how you depict vast intelligence; put your character in front of a chalkboard filled with very long and complicated equations. Fantastic Four fans also know that Reed was once the envy of another smart guy, Viktor Von Doom, who will be appearing for the first time in the MCU, played by Robert Downey Jr. no less, in Avengers: Doomsday. Those two will inevitably tangle in Doomsday and the follow-up Avengers film, Avengers: Secret Wars. But that’s for later. For now, what we didn’t see in the trailer was Reed Richards taking the form of Mister Fantastic and showing off his brain-melting elasticity. We’ll see that soon enough.

Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman

The trailer makes quick work of showing us how Reed Richards and Sue Storm are the heart of the team and in love (they share a passionate kiss). Her powers include not only invisibility but also the ability to create force fields. It’s Sue who gets to deliver the Fantastic Four’s ethos in the trailer by saying, “Whatever life throws at us, we face it together — as a family.”

Ben Grimm/The Thing

Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s The Thing is a sight to behold, the product of a tremendous amount of work by Shakman and his team to make sure Ben Grimm’s transformation into a rock monster looked as realistic as it could be.

 “We want to be true to comics, but we also want to be true to life,” Shakman said during The Fantastic Four Comic-Con panel. “We talked to scientists, we talked to animal experts, we talked to everybody. We went out into the desert to find the best rock to make the Thing right.”

Honoring the Thing’s comics roots while finding a way to infuse as much biological realism as possible is something the MCU has done quite a few times. See, the Hulk. Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s transformation into the Thing involved motion capture technology, the same process that Mark Ruffalo underwent during all his years of playing the Hulk. Moss-Bachrach even received a very helpful message from Ruffalo: “I got a really nice text message from Mark Ruffalo just to demystify the process of motion capture because I’ve never done it before,” Moss-Bachrach said. “He sent a long, generous text message taking a way a bit of how I was scared of the technology.”

Ben’s transformation into The Thing is also the most tragic superhero origin story for any of the Core Four—in the comics, he long struggled with his appearance and how it kept him apart from other people. This is why he wore a trench coat and a hat all the time, which he also does in the trailer. Ben eventually finds love with a blind sculptor named Alicia Masters, and fans have already speculated she’ll be played by Natasha Lyonne in the film.

Johnny Storm/The Human Torch

Johnny Storm is Sue’s younger brother, and the fact that his accident in space turned him into the Human Torch fits well with his hotheaded nature. We get to see him in fully flamed form in the trailer, zipping around in a blazing path through the canyons of the Manhattan skyline and then up into space.

H.E.R.B.I.E.

The friendly sauce-making robot cooking dinner alongside The Thing in the trailer is H.E.R.B.I.E., Reed Richards’ Humanoid Experimental Robot B-Type Integrated Electronics. H.E.R.B.I.E. is one of the many robots that have either aided or fought against Marvel’s geniuses and superheroes, from Vision to Ultron. H.E.R.B.I.E. is definitely in the friend category, and adorable, no less.

Galactus

Toward the trailer’s end, we see Galactus, one of the longest-standing Marvel villains around, hovering over the Statue of Liberty. This cosmic crusher was created in 1966 by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and Mark Gruenwald, starting love as a mortal man but becoming a cosmic entity who needs to eat planets to stay alive. We didn’t get a peek at his surfboard-riding herald, the Silver Surfer, but we can expect her in the movie.

John Malkovich’s mystery character

There has obviously already been plenty of speculation online about who Malkovich’s mystery bearded character is, with the most plausible presumption, to our ears, anyway, landing on the villain Ivan Kragoff/the Red Ghost, a nemesis of the Fantastic Four from the comics. Kragoff was a Soviet scientist who replicated the Core Fore’s celestial mishap and gained the ability to become intangible. He also raises an army of super apes whose powers match those of the Fantastic Four. Keep in mind this is still only speculation until we get confirmation from someone from the film or Marvel, but it’s a good guess.

The Baxter Building and Fantsticar

The Baxter Building is one of the main settings in the trailer, the official residence of the Fantastic Four. It’s another iconic Manhattan skyscraper and the Core Four’s HQ, not so dissimilar from the Avengers Tower, which might not ever exist in this particular universe.

The Fantasticar is also spotted in the trailer—or, at least, it sure looks like it could be the Fantsticar. The gorgeously sleek, retro-perfect blue speedster has a 4 logo on the front, so we’re safe in assuming it is. The car even popped up briefly in Deadpool & Wolverine. 

The Fantastic Four: First Steps launches into theaters on July 25, 2025.

For more on The Fantastic Four: First Steps, check out these stories:

First “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” Footage Revealed Ahead of Trailer Drop

First “The Fantastic Four: New Steps” Trailer Reintroduces Marvel’s First Family to MCU

First Images From “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” Arrive Alongside Teaser

Featured image:(L-R) Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing and H.E.R.B.I.E in 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios’ THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios / © and ™ 2025 MARVEL.