10 Ways To Get The Fantastic 4 Into The MCU (That Wouldn't Suck)

Of all the top-line superhero franchises committed to the silver screen, none has been as horribly mangled by misuse than the Fantastic Four.

The quartet of Mr Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and the Thing were once among Marvel's core characters. In recent years however, partly as a result of the increasingly dire movies about the foursome, their stock has fallen to the extent the comics universe has dismembered and dispersed the group.

It's possible Marvel is deliberately devaluing the FF until 20th Century Fox divest themselves of the movie license, so Marvel can do whatever they want with it again.

If that happens, the Fantastic Four could find their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, rubbing shoulders with the Avengers, Spider-Man, and all the many denizens of the MCU incoming in the near future. The danger is, of course, that the FF will continue to suck, and bring the MCU down with them.

Some cunning filmmaking could help ease the FF into the rest of the MCU in logical and cool ways, without having them turn up out of nowhere. It won't guarantee they'll reverse decades of cinematic misuse, but it would be a damn fine start.

The assembled eggheads of the Avengers have a conundrum they can't solve. It involves space travel - perhaps they're trying locate whatever extradimensional asteroid field Thanos is hanging out in and decide to take the fight to the big blue Titan, or need to build an orbital version of Stark Tower that's a little more resistant to rampaging supervillains and/or Hulks. But space engineering is outside their areas of expertise, so they need a hand.

Step forward arguably the most brilliant super-nerd in the whole Marvel comics continuity, Reed Richards, aka Mr Fantastic. His origin story has him building a spaceship, the same one that bathes him and his homies in astral radiation when they launch it, so space travel is one of his specialisms. Stark and Banner, perhaps reluctantly, accept the help of this outsider, who proves to be even more than the genius he seems.

His super-stretchiness need barely play into his introduction as it’s his intelligence that makes him really stand out. Once Richards is established in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Fantastic 4 seem like less of a shoehorn if and when they show up in full.