Who will play the Fantastic Four in the MCU’s eagerly awaited, long overdue movie version of the first family of Marvel? I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the internet sure is hungry for that information, and a lot of fans – judging by social media and Reddit and all the rest of it – have been expecting this casting news to drop for some time now. Of course, a surprise bombshell of this nature would be a natural at San Diego Comic-Con. Only, there’s no way that’s gonna happen at this weekend’s show. We all wanted FF casting, but all we got was another trailer for The Marvels.
With Hollywood mostly skipping SDCC 2023 due to the actors and writers strikes, among other factors, the traditional Marvel Studios panel – which typically puts all other Comic-Con news to shame when it happens on Saturday night – is off the table this year. Indeed, before the actors even went on strike, Disney/Marvel made the decision to not hold the Hall H bread and circuses event, clearly hedging its bets.
It’s not surprising in light of the current situation in Hollywood, but it’s also an incredible pivot for a studio that made – depending on how you count them up – some 16 announcements at last year’s presentation. The bulk of the MCU’s Phase 5 slate and some of Phase 6 were revealed at the 2022 show in that very specific style of restrained flourish that Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige has mastered. (He’s been doing this a long time now.) And with SDCC having been cancelled the two years prior due to the pandemic, the barrage of new Marvel projects announced last year made many of us present at the show feel like we were being bathed in, well, cosmic rays, just like the Fantastic Four once were.
Now, for the 2023 show, as far as I can tell there’s a Women of Marvel panel on Sunday featuring “talent across publishing, digital media and studios,” which sounds cool, but doesn’t really count as an MCU panel. Cosmo the Spacedog, from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, (or his on-set double anyway) will be on hand throughout the weekend. He’s no doubt a very good dog, but again, it’s not quite the same as, say, a Tom Hiddleston appearance in full Loki regalia.
And then there’s The Marvels trailer, which dropped this morning. It’s a perfectly fine trailer, and if you’re a big fan of Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers (or Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau or Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan), it’s surely exciting. This preview for the Captain Marvel sequel follows an EW cover story (people still read magazines?) on the film from earlier this week, and it’s looking to be the only real MCU news to come out of Comic-Con 2023. And fairly lukewarm news at that, since we already got a trailer back in April. (No doubt Larson and her castmates could’ve shown up in some capacity in San Diego this weekend if not for the actors strike, but a Hall H panel was never in the card.)
The truth is, though, that the films that are closest to release are typically the least exciting part of Feige’s Marvel panels. The very nature of the MCU – hyping up the next movie, the next story arc, new characters, and so on with post-credits scenes or often awkwardly fitted subplots – means that the audience has been trained to be dissatisfied if all they’re getting is a thing they already know all about. Like The Marvels’ second trailer. (Now if Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, and/or Natasha Romanoff made a surprise return in the thing, it might be a different story. Or the Fantastic Four, for that matter.)
So what does this all add up to? Obviously, SDCC is having to deal with the effects of the strikes, as is Marvel. Yesterday I wrote about how it’s a good thing for Comic-Con to not rely on the Hollywood studios, and how in fact the show really doesn’t rely on them; it’s just the big-name stars who get the outsized attention each July. But one can’t help but wonder if the strikes are only part of the situation here for the house that Kevin Feige built.
It’s no secret that Marvel has been in a bit of a downward arc in terms of quality, or at the very least audience interest, these past couple of years. Much has been said about the MCU having seen better days, and one only needs to look at the various changes to release dates since Feige made those announcements just a year ago. Sure, dates change and productions always have to adjust, but even Disney CEO Bob Iger recently said that Marvel has suffered from “diluted focus and attention,” the result of expanding to making the Disney+ TV shows in addition to its already extensive movie slate. And indeed, the exec also said that, as a result, the studio will be cutting back on the amount of Marvel (and Star Wars) projects that it’s making.
But there’s also no getting around the fact that the Phase 4 and 5 heroes of the MCU so far just haven’t hit in the same way that the OG Avengers did. I wasn’t joking when I said above that The Marvels could use an appearance by one of those guys, because it’s become pretty clear that that’s part of the issue behind the MCU fatigue that has set in for many fans. (Do you know anyone who’s actually talking about Secret Invasion, for example?)
So maybe Marvel Studios needed to sit the conventions out for a while regardless of the strikes while Feige and his team figure things out. Or until they cast the Fantastic Four at least.
