Does This Ant-Man Easter Egg Explain How Marvel Will Introduce The Fantastic Four?
Baskin-Robbins has figured it out (obviously).
Fant4stic was terrible. How terrible? Forget single-digit RottenTomatoes scores and box office-ruining tweets - the moment fans saw its sloppy production and napkin script, they were immediately clamouring for the rights of the characters to revert back to Marvel. Of course, six months on that doesn't seem as likely. To retain the rights, Fox only need to make a new movie every few years, so appear to be just retiring the team and hoping that by the time we get the contractually-mandated fourth attempt at the characters everyone's forgotten the Josh Trank disaster.
But don't despair just yet - they may have to play the waiting game, but it looks like Marvel have actually already started setting up a situation where their First Family can appear in the MCU without breaking the internal logic. You see, in the comics, it was the emergence of the Fantastic Four that kicked off the whole Marvel Universe (give or take a Capsicle), and having them pop up ten years in would just be a bit odd and not fit the characters. How would you get around that?
Well, a couple of weeks, YouTube giants CinemaSins turned their eyes to Ant-Man, and in amongst the usual wry observations, they pointed out that in the office of Scott Lang's Baskin-Robbins' boss there were what appeared to be two Fantastic Four movie posters.
It's hard to verify this, but there's certainly design fragments on there that point to these indeed being posters for the earlier Tim Story movies. Now it could easily be an innocuous in-joke - Peyton Reed wanted to direct the 2005 movie and it was known during production that Ant-Man would be released within weeks of Trank's take on the property, both suitable enough reasons for this background detail - but what if it's not? We know Marvel love to tease things out well ahead of time (Black Panther was first alluded to in Iron Man 2 and the Infinity Gauntlet appeared in the background of Thor), so what if this is actually a slight early clue what Marvel would do if they ever got the rights to the Fantastic Four...
5. Fantastic Four Is A Movie Property In The MCU
That's right. The best way to in-universe explain why a Baskin-Robbins manager would have movie posters for Fantastic Four is that movies of the Fantastic Four exist in the MCU. They don't need to be the Tim Story version (although that would allow for a solid Chris Evans in-joke) or Trank's misfire, regardless of the poster (continuity in Marvel movies isn't that strict); it's the notion that's important.
Instead of being the first supers, the Fantastic Four were movie heroes that no doubt captured the imaginations of the public before portals opening in New York and cities were plunged from the sky. This crucially maintains the team's position as the progenitor of the universe and means they're not being shoehorned in after the likes of Guardians Of The Galaxy and Captain Marvel have made their debut.
Sounds a bit crazy, right? Well, there's a lot more than just a stray easter egg to go on - let's take a look at the reasoning.