‘Fantastic Four: First Steps' sounds like it's dripping in Space Race nostalgia

For years, fans of Marvel Comics' First Family, The Fantastic Four, have been clamoring or Hollywood to set a "Fantastic Four" feature film in the Swingin' Sixties.

After all, that was the decade in which The World's Greatest Comic Magazine came to prominence for Stan Lee's House of Ideas. But it's also the greatest decade of all time for the evolution of human spaceflight in the United States.

After numerous Hollywood attempts and misfires to properly translate the adventurous elation that this superhero team generated for millions of readers, Marvel Studios has lit the fuse on "The Fantastic Four: First Steps." The newly christened title is a serious nod to astronaut Neil Armstrong's immortal Apollo 11 message of July 20, 1969 when he stepped onto the lunar surface and said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." 

And, in yet another instance of synchronicity — this one linking "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" to today's private space economy — Blue Origin named its first crew-carrying New Shepard capsule the NSS First Step. That suborbital craft carried company founder Jeff Bezos and three other passengers on Blue Origin's first-ever human spaceflight on July 20, 2021.

Related: What was the space race?

Those are just some of the ties to NASA, space tourism and space race nostalgia we're anxious to see when this long-awaited project touches down. In a way, Marvel's "Fantastic Four" and NASA both came into maturity during the turbulent 1960s, and we can't wait to hunt for more cinematic easter eggs!

For the uninitiated, it's vital to know that the Fantastic Four was a spacefaring clan who accidentally got dosed with cosmic rays during an experimental test mission that granted them superpowers once they arrived back home. Written by Lee and drawn by Jack "The King" Kirby, the debut issue hit newsstands on Aug. 8, 1961, roughly three months after astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space in his Friendship 7 capsule on May 5. 

Directed by Matt Shakman ("WandaVision") and starring Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/Invisible Woman), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/The Thing) and Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/Human Torch), "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" just began filming in England. It's destined to be one of the cornerstones of the MCU's Phase Six and is slated for release on July 25, 2025. 

The setting for this retro-futuristic project will be 1960s New York City in an alternate dimension, as some of the teaser set images and maps of the Baxter Building, the well-known Manhattan tower headquarters of the Fantastic Four, have revealed.

Additional cast members include Ralph Ineson as Galactus, Julia Garner as Shalla-Bal/Silver Surfer, and Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich and Natasha Lyonne in unannounced roles.

At last month's San Diego Comic-Con, Disney's "The Fantastic Four" Hall H panel screened a special concept trailer for attendees. The clip showed grainy test footage of Reed Richards instructing students on a "Fantastic Science" TV show, four team members suiting up in stylized blue-and-white spacesuits, the hovering Fantasti-car approaching the Baxter Building, Ben and Johnny participating in a dating game called "Let's Make a Match," tense mission control-type preflight checklists with a fiery retro spaceship blastoff and, finally, the purple hues of the mighty Galactus staring ominously through skyscraper windows.

We hope the filmmakers lean into additional aesthetics from the Apollo era with groovy fashion and a mod, pop-art sensibility. As seen in Marvel Studios' Valentine's Day cast announcement artwork, a framed photo of Ben Grimm in an Apollo-style moonwalking spacesuit is seen on the wall in the background. Beside him is H.E.R.B.I.E., their domestic robot, inferring that this age is not aligned with our own.

This retro design approach should serve the film well, as it dovetails nicely with NASA's Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs that spanned the same momentous decade. However, since the film will be rooted in an alternative Earth that exhibits both vintage and futuristic architectural details, who knows how those original events would have played out in this mad multiverse? 

It's possible that NASA has advanced far faster with Reed Richards' uncanny knack for cutting-edge astrophysics and next-generation engineering, allowing the storied space agency to have hopped from the moon to Mars or beyond by the end of that alternate world's century. 

Regardless of how the plot eventually unfurls, artifacts and allusions to NASA and our spirit of space exploration are certain to be ingrained in the movie's DNA. It will be interesting to see exactly how the Fantastic Four make these "First Steps" by perhaps steering humanity into another dimension of discovery, NASA's pioneering astronauts did, and maybe navigating into the antimatter netherworld of the Negative Zone and its denizen of bizarro celestial beings.

"The Fantastic Four: First Steps" lands in theaters on July 25, 2025.