Thankfully, the inspiration is all about the source material. Director Matt Shakman’s highly anticipated Fantastic Four: First Steps won’t piggyback on Marvel’s many mistakes made by the beloved comic book franchise in their 2005, 2007 and 2015 attempts to adapt the vaunted First Family for the Silver Screen and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Rather, Shakman reveals in a new interview that First Steps is focusing on the comics. Shakman said (per ComicBook.com):

“I’m not so much looking at the other movies.
I’m looking at the comics themselves.
I’m a huge comic book fan.
I’ve been a big fan of the Fantastic Four since I was a kid.

So, going back to Kirby and Lee and Byrne and following all the way up to what’s happening, certainly Hickman and Waid and Ryan North, what he’s been doing.
I’m trying to figure out who these characters are to me and how to bring them to life in the best possible way.
And that’s really where I’ve started and how we’ve approached it.”

And fans of the Jessica Alba and Chris Evans’ Fantastic Four (2005) and its sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, or even the much-maligned 2015 reboot, should not expect to find any callbacks or nods to these movies — because Shakman has surprisingly never seen any of them. The First Steps director told Entertainment Weekly:

“I haven’t seen those movies.
When I got hired to do this,
it didn’t feel like that would be productive, to watch those movies.
People ask me about, ‘How is this different from those other ones?’
And I don’t think it’s helpful to make something in opposition to something else.”

Fantastic Four: First Steps Isn’t Another Origin Story

Fantastic Four director Matt Shakman isn’t talking when it comes to Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom possibly appearing in First Steps. However, the WandaVision, Game of Thrones and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia director is rightfully trusting the fandom and not trying to stuff yet another origin story down moviegoers’ throats. Shakman elaborated on First Steps being something totally “our own thing” in the same interview with Entertainment Weekly:

“One of the things we decided early on was not to do an origin story.
One of the ways we’re making it our own thing is we’re not telling the story of them going up and being changed, and starting our story [there].
There’s a lot of well-known narrative that leads into that moment, right?
And then you’re making up your new story starting basically at the end of the first act.
And we thought, ‘Well, let’s just start this thing off on a completely new foot. So, we are beginning after that.'”

While Shakman has also teased Ralph Ineson’s Galactus, the long-awaited First Steps will reimagine the space race with the super-heroic Fantastic Four leading the charge rather than those who originally took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Shakman said during the same sit-down:

“The comic was created in the early ’60s, really at the same time that the space race was starting,
so it is infused with that idea of looking to the stars and dreaming of a future where we would be space travelers.
And so, I really wanted to take all of that great stuff from Apollo 11 and just imagine that instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, it was the Storms and Ben Grimm and Reed Richards heading off into space.”

Shakman’s Fantastic Four: First Steps is currently filming, and the movie will land in theaters on July 25, 2025, just two weeks after James Gunn’s Superman takes flight in cinemas. Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s First Family has their work cut out for them, too, regardless of RDJ’s involvement, because Ineson’s Devourer of Worlds looms large.