Warning: Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Every ten years or so, someone tries and fails to reboot the Fantastic Four. It happened in 1994, 2005, and 2015, but Marvel Studios’ new whizbang attempt, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, relaunches the company’s once-flagship characters and finally, mercifully, gets the formula right by grounding its cosmic happenings within a family soap opera. However, it leaves one key ingredient for its mid-credits scene, while also paying tribute to the “first family’s” long history after the credits. It’s the best of both worlds, cheekily showing us where the fab four have been, while also hinting at where they’ll be headed next.
The movie climaxes with the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s umpteenth battle of New York, albeit this time set in an alternate universe. The film takes place on Earth-828 — named, as the credits reveal, for Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby’s birthday. The battle ends with the Invisible Woman, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), mysteriously being brought back to life by her infant son, Franklin, after defeating the movie’s gargantuan, world-eating villain, Galactus (Ralph Ineson). The insatiable cosmic aimed to destroy Earth and kidnap the boy, whom he believed could take on his eons-long curse of consuming planets. Clearly, Galactus saw something special in Franklin, though neither Sue nor his genius father Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) know what yet. But someone equally intelligent might have an idea.
Midway through the credits and one time-jump later, we see Sue reading a children’s book to a curious Franklin, now four years old, in the family’s fancy living room. She finishes the book and walks away to look for another — robot helper H.E.R.B.I.E. semi-jokingly hands her Darwin’s On the Origin of Species; maybe Franklin is already hyper-literate? — but when she returns, she senses something amiss, and the backdrop takes on a subtle, green-ish tint.
Hidden from view behind the living room’s enclosed fireplace, Sue — powers at the ready — spots an uninvited guest kneeling before her son, who reaches out to greet the stranger. The intruder’s face is obscured by a familiar green hood and cloak, and as the camera creeps forward, it reveals in his hand the iconic metal mask of Victor Von Doom, aka Doctor Doom, arguably the greatest antagonist in all of Marvel comics.
The scene (directed by Joe and Anthony Russo) cuts to black before we see Doom’s face. But after last year’s Comic-Con, we know the character will be played by Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr. in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, and its 2027 sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars, both directed by the Russos. That leaves the question of what Doom wants with Franklin. In the 2015 comic event Secret Wars, Franklin played a significant part in Doom’s multiversal plans, which re-wrote reality so that Franklin was now his child, and could control Galactus to wage war on the heroes. This big-screen meeting between the mystical megalomaniac and the son of his greatest rivals could end up being a major inciting incident for the upcoming Avengers films, and could even be what drives the Fantastic Four to seek out the mainline Marvel universe (Earth-616), as they seemed to do in the Thunderbolts* post-credits scene.
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Doom’s presence in the Earth-828 universe is foreshadowed at least twice during First Steps, each during a United Nations-like gathering of countries, as the camera lingers on an empty seat marked “Latveria” — the fictitious Balkan kingdom he rules with an iron fist — and frames the country’s flag in the background. Doom’s inclusion is really no surprise — he’s appeared in every adaptation of the Fantastic Four to date, across film, TV, and even radio. It’s like the Joker showing up to fight Batman, a no-brainer.
The earliest Fantastic Four adaptation is the basis for the movie’s second stinger. After the credits roll, an old-timey CRT television set plays scenes from the fictitious Fantastic Four cartoon seen in the film. It’s based on the real-world 1967 series The Fantastic Four from Hanna-Barbera, but it features the likenesses of the new cast (Kirby, Pascal, and Joseph Quinn) fighting some of their archnemeses from the comics. H.E.R.B.I.E.’s robot claw reaches out to turn off the TV screen, and that’s that.
You could spin this as its own multiversal tease, since it isn’t the first time a toon in this era’s jittery hand-drawn style has appeared in a post-credits tease. The first was at the end of Sony’s animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, in which future Spider-Man Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac) finds himself on “Earth-67,” and comes face to face with the classic TV Spider-Man, in order to re-create the famous viral image of two Spider-Men pointing at one another. This universe was likely named for the year 1967, when ABC’s Spider-Man cartoon also debuted.
Of course, the two cartoons never actually crossed over, so their interconnectedness is just conjecture. This look at the new Fantastic Four in animated form more likely just functions as a joke — a reminder that while the Fantastic Four have been around for decades, this is the first live-action adaptation that one could call actually satisfying. As they probably say on Earth-828: the fourth time’s a charm.
