I realized a horrifying statistic—with Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter, and Venom 3, Sony’s SPUMC (Spider-Man Universe of Marvel Characters lol) is the dominant superhero universe of 2024. Marvel only has Deadpool & Wolverine coming to theaters this year, and DC only has Joker: Folie a Deux, so SPUMC reigns supreme. You know what, if anything can kill superhero movies, it’s a year of SPUMC.
Anyway, Marvel proceeds apace with Fantastic Four, which is set to film this summer and stars Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. Joining them is, reportedly, Julia Garner of Ozark and the failed Madonna biopic fame, which means Marvel is all-in on casting breakout TV stars in their new F4 movie. That’s one way to cast people with established fan bases and still take credit when your superhero thing makes them even more famous.
With Madonna scrapping her own biopic—I would watch the HELL out of a behind-the-scenes documentary about Madonna’s casting process for that non-movie!—Garner has some time freed up, and she is allegedly playing Shalla-Bal, a female version of the Silver Surfer. I say “allegedly” because this is not confirmed by Marvel, but they’re supposed to start filming in a couple months, so they are rounding out the cast now, and after the last couple years, they need to pull out all the stops to ensure movies like Fantastic Four are a hit.
The deal with Shalla-Bal is that she’s a space empress whose lover becomes the Silver Surfer, separating them forever. Tragic! Except in one single continuity of the comics, she becomes a Silver Surfer, too, and all this really means is that Galactus is coming. Galactus is one of the few Marvel supervillains people actually care about, which again is about hedging their bets to ensure nerds buy into the new F4 and make this movie a hit next summer. They will throw EVERYTHING at this movie to get nerds on board.
I guess I like this for Julia Garner in a “get paid” sense, but as I’ve said before, I don’t think superhero stuff is going to work out for actors in the 2020s the way it did in the 2010s. Last decade, a lot of people got rich, and a few people got very rich, playing superheroes. It made several people globally famous and opened every professional door to them. But I’m not sure the movies have the same cache now. I don’t think audiences are entirely done with superhero movies, but I think we’re sort of back in a pre-Avengers spot, where every movie is not an automatic success, and audiences have to be won over every time out.
The Fantastic Four have the advantage, like the X-Men, of being a perennially popular superhero team that fans want to see “done right” on the big screen, so even with three previous and entirely bad movies behind them, there is a lot of goodwill, already, for the new effort (racists mad about Pedro Pascal’s casting and misogynists mad about Julia Garner aside. I maintain you do not play to those “fans”). After the last couple of years, the MCU needs some stability from which to build their next-gen storytelling. They had Iron Man last time, this time, if they nail this movie, the Fantastic Four might be that cornerstone that can reliably hold everything else up while they build out new teams and heroes. We’ll see.
