The Avengers need a new leader, and given how many potential candidates for the gig have either died, retired, or turned evil, they need it soon. The multiverse is collapsing, timelines are unravelling, box office numbers are wobbling, the Kang plan is in tatters and Blade is on its ninth script. So, naturally, Marvel’s answer is to hand the reins to a stretchy man in sensible shoes who once broke the entire multiverse.
Yes, according to The Fantastic Four: First Steps director Matt Shakman, the awesome foursome’s Reed Richards is being lined up as the new leader of Earth’s mightiest heroes. Or at least, he is (at times) in the comics, and it looks increasingly like he might be the only reality-straddling, buttoned up polymathable to take on this job on the big screen.
“He goes from being the nerdy scientist who’s locked away in the lab, to the husband and the father who’d do anything to protect his family, to the guy who’s leading the Avengers,” Shakman told Variety, in a new interview ahead of the release of First Steps. “I realised that the version we were building had to have all of those elements.”
With the Fantastic Four’s debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe now only a week away, it’s perhaps the right time to take a look at exactly what kind of man Marvel might be nudging into the empty chair. Let’s not forget that this is a mantle once sort of jointly held by Iron Man and Captain America.
From nerdy scientist to man in charge … Pascal in Fantastic Four: First Steps. Photograph: Jay Maidment/20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios
Reed Richards, by contrast, is less a natural leader than he is the kind of man who accidentally invents godhood before breakfast. In the comics, he’s a genius, a father, a sometimes war criminal, and very occasionally the most powerful being in existence. If Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark was all ego, charisma and self-loathing in a can, and Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers was apple pie and emotional repression with the ability to bench-press liberty, then Reed is the guy who treats collapsing timelines like a crossword puzzle and has, on more than one occasion in the comics, tried to solve galactic crises using charts.
Perhaps the difference this time around (after two attempts to bring the Fantastic Four to the big screen during the 20th Century Fox era) is that Richards is now being played by Pedro Pascal, an actor who has already proven in The Mandalorian that he can project warmth, gravitas and reluctant-dad energy despite wearing a bucket on his head. If anyone can revive Marvel, it’s the guy who transformed what should have been another run-of-the-mill zombie video game adaptation (The Last of Us) into high-end post-apocalyptic art-house TV.
Giving Reed Richards the top job also speaks volumes about where the MCU is right now. Gone are the days of heroes with moral codes, defined character arcs, and just one version of themselves per universe. We’re deep into the age of collapse and crossover, where no one knows who’s running what, where half the audience are Googling “Wait, who is that?” during every post-credits scene, and the only thing holding the multiverse together is the vague promise that Downey’s Doctor Doom will eventually reboot the franchise with the sheer force of his contempt.
Dad energy … Pascal with Bella Ramsey in The Last of Us. Photograph: HBO/AP
All of which brings us to hints this week (denied by Shakman) that the metal-plated menace might make his first appearance in First Steps, before presumably following Marvel’s first family into the main MCU in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday. If Reed is Marvel’s reset button, Doom is its nuclear option — the character you deploy when you’ve run out of timelines, villains, and narrative excuses.
The idea of Reed going up against a twisted variant of the previous Avengers figurehead – if this new Doom really is some kind of alternate-universe Tony Stark with a god complex and a cloak budget – has a certain multiverse-bending symmetry to it. So why not have Reed face him down as a new type of Avengers leader? They might just be from the same universe, and this is a battle that has been carried out countless times in print. Mister Fantastic is brilliant. He’s brave. And he’s got a pretty impressive track record of saving all of existence – which could come in useful when you’re facing the sort of supervillain who treats the fabric of existence like a mood board for his ego.
Unlike Stark or Rogers, Reed doesn’t need a cool catchphrase, or a billion-dollar suit with built-in sarcasm. He just needs a quiet room, a few hundred monitors, and the freedom to quietly map the collapse of the multiverse.