Did Marvel SPOIL the ending battle of their upcoming, highly anticipated Fantastic Four reboot? Maybe!
CCXP, known to us as Comic Con, recently dropped a bit a bit of an information bomb on fans of the MCU. With Marvel’s Fantastic Four movie being in development for almost a full decade, it’s hard to believe the time is nearly here for us to bask in the glory of FINALLY seeing Marvel’s first super-team hit the big screen once again. And… I think I speak for everyone when I say, I REALLY hope it’s good. But the Comic Con hype didn’t come from Marvel directly, no. Instead, an attendee at CCSD who managed to catch a screening of a scene from the movie, left Comic Con only to describe the footage in detail and post it online for fanboys like me to obsess over. This will have potential spoilers for The Fantastic Four: First Steps– but as with any leak making the rounds online, let’s all take a nice big grain of salt with this information. Let’s get into it.
On June 1st, a publication was made which described the screened footage and to most of our surprise… It kinda sounds like we were revealed the ending of the movie. BUT I don’t think that’s the case, for reasons we’re going to talk about. The description made available online states the following: “The Fantastic Four members are inside their spaceship, and Sue (Vanessa Kirby) is starting to go into labor. But Shalla- Bal / Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) is chasing them. Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) takes over the ship and tries to dodge her. They jump into a kind of hyperspace. The CGI is great. We see Reed (Pedro Pascal) stretching and using his powers. Shalla-Bal almost reaches Sue’s belly—she wants the baby. Johnny (Joseph Quinn) takes over the ship’s cannons and tries to shoot the Surfer. He makes jokes about her being sexy. Meanwhile, Sue continues to have contractions. Reed tells Ben to go into a black hole. Ben gets worried. Reed tells him to trust. End of scene.”
Okay, shall we break it down? Of course, this might feel like the ending scene at first. For those that stayed through the post-credit scene of Thunderbolts*, you know that this scene could theoretically tie directly in as we see the Fantastic Four’s ship making its way into the main 616 sacred timeline. And truthfully, that’s about as far as I was going to let this go. I mean, the supposed ending scene of Fantastic Four seems to literally lead (through a portal) into the greater MCU timeline. But then, something happened. I sat down to gather footage for the video above and noticed something in the Tickets On Sale trailer that made me second guess myself. In the trailer, we see mostly recycled footage from the film’s main trailer, with some new scenes spliced in. And one of those scenes changes everything… a shot of Sue, Reed, and baby Franklin which, for our eagle-eyed viewers, might stand out because Sue isn’t pregnant with the baby in this image, she’s already had him.
Back to the leaked footage. The description indicates that Silver Surfer is after Franklin while he’s still inside of Sue. He hasn’t been born yet. So, when Shalla is reaching for Sue’s belly and “she wants the baby” it has to be a scene that takes place BEFORE whatever is happening in that other scene. So, is the footage that played at CCXP REALLY the ending scene? Or… is it the exact opposite? What if, the scene we were shown at Comic Con is actually the BEGINNING of the film? Maybe an opening scene or a prelude? See, lots of movies start with a small vignette of events later in the movie, that are re-contextualized by the story later. Sort of a reverse twist. Is it possible that this movie starts with some sort of conflict that we won’t understand until the movie hits us with a “1 week earlier” title card? I think that’s equally as likely.
But, when does Sue have the baby? It would be weird if Marvel was making toys of Franklin Richards if he wasn’t going to be in the film, but it’s not impossible. However, it could be that the scene in question actually takes place in the middle of the film.
Akin to Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer, it could be one of those things where there’s a fake-out conflict with the Surfer where the team does battle against them in the middle of the movie, only to then be joined by the Surfer in a battle against Galactus- who we know is looking to be the big bad of this movie. Could it be that this is the moment just before Shalla-Bal realizes that Earth IS worth saving and changes her mission? Maybe so.
But then, what about the portal they supposedly fly into? Well, what if it wasn’t a portal at all? Or at least, what if it wasn’t a portal to a new universe, but a portal or black hole that leads them into the Negative Zone? Or even back in time? One of the hot topics about this movie is when Reed says the line “We eat dinner together every Sunday at 7PM on the dot.” This almost sounds like Reed televising this information to set a trap for Galactus, no? Almost like baiting the villain. Couple that with the shot from the OG trailer of Ben checking his watch as if to say this huge cosmic cloud is right on time. Does the team have some sort of prior knowledge of this attack and WHEN it will be? Almost as if they’ve done it before?
Could it be that Reed cracked time travel and uses it to WIN in the battle of Galactus that they’d already fought and lost? Was this scene shown at CCXP just a clip from the middle of the movie BEFORE the Fantastic Four goes back in time to change the outcome? Is that why Franklin is now born and part of the family? Obviously, Sue isn’t going to fight these battles with a baby in her belly, so we have to assume that she isn’t pregnant for long. Well, either that or there is indeed some time bouncing going on.
So, what originally seemed like a wildcard move from Disney to release the ending scene of their biggest movie this year, turned out to be more confusing without context than we originally thought. And after watching and re-watching all of the clips, footage, and leaks we have available, I can say with full confidence that… I STILL don’t know what’s going on with the movie but I hope it’s good- and I think it will be.
But, of course, I’m only one side of this highly debatable topic so let me know your theories and opinions on what this footage could mean to the greater story of the film, and have a FANTASTIC day!
