The Fantastic Four Leap Into the Unknown in New ‘First Steps’ Teaser

The Fantastic Four reintroduce themselves in the first teaser for the highly-anticipated superhero flick that finally brings the legendary quartet into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The new clip for The Fantastic Four: First Steps doesn’t give away anything in terms of plot, but it does offer viewers a first glimpse at the movie’s cast, retro-futuristic look, and space-age action. While First Steps isn’t set to be a Fantastic Four origin story, the teaser does primarily center around Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) ruminating on how he, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) acquired their powers and became Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and the Thing.

“Before we went up the first time, you couldn’t turn invisible,” Reed tells Storm. “Ben wasn’t a rock. And Johnny never caught fire.”

Storm replies, “Ben has always been a rock. Johnny is Johnny. And I am right here. Whatever life throws at us, we’ll face it together.”

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is set to arrive in theaters on July 25. Along with Pascal, Kirby, Quinn, and Moss-Bachrach, the movie is set to star Julia Garner as the Silver Surfer and Ralph Ineson as Galactus. Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich, and Natasha Lyonne are also part of the cast. 

Last summer, First Steps director Matt Shakman spoke about his vision for the film with Entertainment Weekly and explained why they chose not to do an “origin story” about the group going up into space and acquiring their powers. “There’s a lot of well-known narrative that leads into that moment, right?” He said. “And then you’re making up your new story starting basically at the end of the first act, and we thought, ‘Well, let’s just start this thing off on a completely new foot. So we are beginning after that.'”

Still, Shakman said, outer space, galactic exploration, and the space race did inform the movie in other ways. “It is infused with that idea of looking to the stars and dreaming of a future where we would be space travelers,” he said. “And so I really wanted to take all of that great stuff from Apollo 11 and just imagine that instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, it was the Storms and Ben Grimm and Reed Richards heading off into space.”