What Do Ant-Man 3 and the next Fantastic Four Have in Common?

The runners of the Marvel Cinematic Universe took the less than intuitive course of making one of the mega-franchise's weaker links, the Ant-Man series, the launch pad for Phase Five (specifically the third Ant-Man film, Ant-Man: Quantumania).

In hindsight the decision proved to be . . . less than ideal. Many were less than pleased with the third Ant-Man movie, which opened big and then faded fast, ultimately leaving it with an underwhelming gross. Few properly appreciated all the factors that went into this, like the severity of the shortfall of the gross in China (which was decisive for the worldwide take), but even without that fuller view there was no way to present the film as the big success Marvel hoped for, with something of this reflected in the contrast between the $1 billion worldwide gross Screen Rant predicted, and the less than half billion it ended up with. The failure predictably hung heavily over the franchise afterward, which likely did not help the less than triumphant release of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which, again, fell short of expectations on opening weekend and its full run, even if not by so much as to seem an unqualified letdown), or the outright debacle of The Marvels.

Marvel is taking a similar risk in launching Phase Six of the cinematic side of the franchise with the Fantastic Four film coming out next July--Fantastic Four: First Steps.

In contrast with Ant-Man 3 the Fantastic Four film has not been proven a "weaker link," as this will be the MCU's first Fantastic Four film. However, in its premise the Fantastic Four series does entail some of the quirkiness that has probably been a "bit much" for many moviegoers (the stretching abilities of Mr. Fantastic coming off as a bit goofy, for instance, while the depiction of the planet-eating Galactus, who apparently is the villain in this film, entails similar challenges).

The decision to set Fantastic Four on a retro-futuristic Earth also seems risky. The track record of retro-sf at the box office is not great, after all (much as a great many hardcore science fiction fans enjoy them, I suspect they mean a little too much "A-effect" for the general audience), while the implication is of the "multiverse" being important to its premise--not necessarily fatal, but at least implying the possibility of "brain work" for an audience that has sometimes been willing to "go with it" in the past (with Spider-Man, again with Deadpool & Wolverine) but also seems to have regarded the MCU as demanding too much of it for some time now (given its combination of vastness and propensity for self-reference, which is, again, all right for the hardcore fan, not so all right for the more general audience whose liking the movie will be critical to its being a Marvel-caliber success). This is the more the case given that while prior MCU films made use of the multiverse for drawing together familiar, well-received characters, at the core here is a brand new group which have yet to win such acceptance.

And of course, the makers of any new Fantastic Four film also have to contend with the baggage of the less than wholly successful prior attempts to launch a Fantastic Four franchise. (I personally think that the criticism was exaggerated--that the first Fantastic Four especially was entirely satisfactory as the kind of superhero film we still expected back in 2005 however much the "cool" critics sneer at it now, and that the darker 2015 film had a lot of interesting ideas with a lot of potential, some of which Josh Trank did realize in the film we got--but I know that this is not the "conventional wisdom" on either of those movies, and they may well contribute to a sense that any Fantastic Four movie will just not be very good.)

Of course, it may turn out that the "something different" discussed here is exactly what an aging franchise in need of renewal requires--all as the brevity of pop cultural memory that can be so limiting may help here by limiting the significance of any shortfalls of the prior Fantastic Four films for this attempt. Still, it seems to me that there are more than the usual grounds for uncertainty here when we consider its fortunes--even before one considers that the response to Captain America 4 (coming out next Valentine's Day) will matter. The film's winning audiences back to Marvel may boost the brand helpfully, while, alas, the movie's doing poorly may work against it, and in turn have similar implications for a Marvel Phase Six of which we are just beginning to see the faintest outlines.