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What if Thanos really had finger-snapped away half of all life in the universe and then kicked back on his scorched Titan homestead like a giant, purple Cincinnatus? What if Ultron had succeeded in uploading himself into the cloud, turning every smart fridge and Fitbit into a genocidal death bot? What if Loki had kept the Tesseract, conquered Earth, and turned Avengers Tower into a golden skyscraper shaped like his own smirking face?
These are the Marvel sliding‑doors moments we are secretly relieved that we will never see – too bleak, too bonkers, or too off‑brand to survive outside the whiteboard of producer and Marvel boss Kevin Feige.
But what if the Disney-owned studio actually went there? What if the universe did end in tears, ash and the soft whirr of a retro‑futurist espresso machine sputtering out its final cortado as Galactus devours the sun?
This may be the queasy promise behind The Fantastic Four: First Steps – a film that appears to revel in retro‑futurist utopian aesthetics but also looks likely to end in cosmic obliteration. Its latest trailer, out this week, certainly leaves us wondering if, this time, the bad guys may win.
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Early glimpses of the film read like a love‑letter to a future that never was, all soft lighting, swooping mid‑century rocket ships and wholesome family dynamics. Reed Richards is busy tinkering with gadgets that run on vacuum tubes and barely repressed genius. Ben Grimm lurks in a letterman jacket, looking like a walking pile of regret. Sue Storm floats weightlessly in a zero‑gravity kitchen that wouldn’t look out of place in a SpaceX commercial directed by Don Draper’s artier younger brother, while Johnny Storm radiates cocksure charisma and combustion.
All that Apollo‑era optimism curdles fast. We cut to trembling ground crews, misbehaving solar flares and giant shadow‑objects looming towards Earth – before Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer glides in like a chrome‑plated herald of doom to announce that this planet is toast, and you may as well give up now.
In any other Marvel movie, that would be the cue for a heroic fightback and Galactus being packed off to the nearest celestial naughty‑step. The end‑credits would show the team curing their hunger pangs in an all‑night diner. But there is something so downcast about this new trailer that you can’t help wondering if everything is going to work out for the best this time.
After all, this isn’t the Marvel Cinematic Universe we have come to know and love. It may be a sleek, chrome‑plated utopia built on jetpacks and optimism, but as it is one of maybe a million universes, it is also eminently dispensable, instantly rebootable and narratively nonbinding. Could all those soaring space bridges, apple‑cheeked children and pastel dioramas be a plot device to show how easily the studio can destroy the visual playground in front of it – as long as it has 999,999 other realities to plunder for future episodes?
Perhaps the biggest concern – for those who stayed through Thunderbolts* to its startling second post‑credits scene – is that the Fantastic Four’s retro rocket ship is shown hurtling toward Earth‑616 like a vinyl‑wrapped harbinger of doom. Feige insists this may not be that ship, but if it is, then all those efforts in First Steps may just have been in vain. The opening moments of next year’s Avengers: Doomsday could yet show the Four crash‑landing into the MCU, bruised, broken, and with apocalypse on their ash‑flecked lips.
