Kevin Feige hopes The Fantastic Four: First Steps does Marvel's First Family "justice " as it helps launch the MCU into a new era.

The Fantastic Four have had quite the journey to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They are arguably one of Marvel's most well-known sets of characters thanks to multiple adaptations across film and television. However, because Marvel needed to sell off the rights of some of its characters to keep the lights on, by the time the MCU was becoming a thing, the Fantastic Four were owned by a completely different studio doing their own thing with the characters. Fox made three valiant attempts to make the characters work on the big screen. The first two films are very much products of their time, and the less said about the third, the better. Marvel Megaboss Kevin Feige has been on the ground with these characters since those two initial misfires and recently explained to Empire that Marvel's First Family coming home for The Fantastic Four: First Steps couldn't have happened at a better time.

"I think that there are no four characters that are more important for the history of Marvel. When Disney bought Fox, it was really an unexpected dream come true," Feige explains. "It came at the perfect time, to help us launch into a new era. They are Marvel's First Family, and I really wanted to do them justice."

And "justice" means leaning into every aspect of what made these characters great in the first place. For a long time, it felt like comic book movies were ashamed to admit that they were comic book movies (video games were doing a similar dance) because some in Hollywood thought they were a lesser medium despite so much evidence to the contrary. That's why a lot of earlier comic book movies feel like they are twisting themselves into knots to try and get away from their own source material ("What would you prefer, yellow spandex?"). Not this time, though. Feige is ready to lean with The Fantastic Four: First Steps and embrace it all, even the aspects people might turn their nose up at.

"There was still a bit of fear of being silly," he says of those films. "In another time, some might consider the notion of somebody with a big, angular helmet walking through a city goofy. I consider it awesome." Well, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been pretty good at portraying these characters as accurately as possible, and they've been doing it since the first Iron Man film all the way back in 2008. As the studio heads into a "new era," there's no reason to think they're going to start holding back now.