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The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now playing on the 2025 movies schedule, arriving six years after Marvel Studios gained the film rights to the superhero team as a result of the Disney/Fox merger. WandaVision’s Matt Shakman was selected to direct the fifth movie starring Marvel’s First Family (counting the unreleased 1994 feature), but he wasn’t the only MCU filmmaker involved with the production. Shakman recently revealed how Joe and Anthony Russo took an interest in Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Thing and Human Torch’s latest cinematic foray.
The Russo Brothers have been part of the MCU family ever since they delivered Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014, and they followed that up with Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Then at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, it was announced that they’d return to helm the upcoming Marvel movies Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. But as far as The Fantastic Four: First Steps was concerned, here’s what Shakman had to say to Deadline about The Russo Brothers being around during filming:
They were very curious about what we were doing, they came to tour our sets, they would watch scenes that we were cutting together, they wanted to get to know these people as they were working on their story and their script, so that I could pass the baton to them and these characters would be well cared for.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps began filming on July 30, 2024. This came a week after it was not only announced at SDCC that the Russo Brothers were stepping back into the MCU, but that Robert Downey Jr. would be returning as well to play the team’s arch-nemesis, Doctor Doom. With Doom taking over as the lead antagonist of Doomsday and Secret Wars from Jonathan Majors’ Kang The Conqueror, and then the later confirmation that the Fantastic Four themselves will be in both movies too, it’s no wonder Joe and Anthony Russo had a vested interest in First Steps.
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Like Matt Shakman said, they needed to get a handle on Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn’s characters before inheriting them for the next Avengers movies. I won’t share any spoilers for First Steps here since the movie just opened, but its events pave the way for Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm to team up with the Avengers, New Avengers and the X-Men, among others. This was teased back in May in the Thunderbolts* post-credits scene with the arrival of a ship adorned with the Fantastic Four logo.
We’ll see how the Fantastic Four do under the Russo Brothers’ supervision when Avengers: Doomsday comes out on December 18, 2026, followed by Avengers: Secret Wars on December 17, 2027. Before those, however, the next MCU movie up is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, slated for July 31, 2026.
