Marvel confirms the Fantastic Four casting everyone expected

Well… it’s official. The casting news that we all saw coming has finally landed, and Marvel has its new Fantastic Four. If you somehow missed the weeks of speculation and hype, that’s Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing. It’s not exactly exciting news since anyone following Fantastic Four news basically knew it already, but at least the announcement came with a cute Valentine’s Day graphic.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe version of the Fantastic Four has been a long time coming. Following the big flop of Fantastic Four (2015), the characters officially moved into Kevin Feige’s sandbox in 2019 when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, which owned the rights to the X-Men as well as F4. Feige didn’t officially announce a Fantastic Four movie until San Diego Comic-Con in July 2022 (when he also announced the ill-fated Kang Dynasty Avengers movie).

Feige initially set a Fantastic Four release date for November 8, 2024. Jon Watts, director of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy, was attached to direct, but had already left the project before Feige’s release date announcement. In August 2022, WandaVision’s Matt Shakman was brought on board. In September, Marvel Studios tapped writers Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer—whose credits included indies The Last Of The Great Romantics and Bert And Arnie’s Guide To Friendship—to pen the script. But by March 2023, they were replaced by Avatar: The Way Of Water scribe Josh Friedman. Meanwhile, there seemed to be new casting rumors every week as to who would play the titular team: Matt Smith? Jodie Comer? Jack Quaid? Lily James? Daveed Diggs?

By November 2023, the “Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards” rumor seemed to solidify into accepted truth, along with Kirby (Napoleon), Quinn (Stranger Things), and Moss-Bachrach (The Bear). The news was all but confirmed when fans noticed Pascal’s SAG-AFTRA bio stated he “will soon begin production on Marvel Studios’ FANTASTIC FOUR.”

Now the news is actually confirmed, along with a new release date, July 25, 2025. (BTW, Thunderbolts has also moved to May 2, 2025, per Deadline.) As we’ve noted before, casting an older Reed Richards suggests we’ll be skipping over the origin story we’ve already seen on screen multiple times before (an idea that worked out pretty well in the case of MCU Spider-Man). The retro branding of this announcement also suggests the film may lean into a classic comic book aesthetic; it certainly fits with Shakman’s previous work on WandaVision. Now we just need to know who’s being cast as the movie’s villain: Galactus? Silver Surfer? Doctor Doom? (Ben Mendelsohn, who starred in Captain Marvel, would like that job.)

At times, a big-screen Fantastic Four has felt a little cursed—and the movie is coming at a time when Marvel is in turmoil and the future of superhero cinema is uncertain. Still, the studio seems to be putting its full weight behind a new team. “Fantastic Four is the foundation for everything that came after in the comics. There’s certainly been versions of it [on screen], but never inhabiting the storytelling of the MCU. And that’s something that is really exciting for us,” Feige told Entertainment Weeklyexactly a year ago today. “We plan on that being a big pillar of the MCU going forward, just the way they’ve been in the comics for 50 or 60 years.”