Kevin Feige confirms Marvel Studios' Fantastic Four is a period piece - and it's not set in New York City (at least as we know it)

Popverse's top stories of the day

• 35 years ago, Tim Burton's Batman was the movie that teased a pop culture future owned by Marvel Studios
• WATCH: Watch the Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama Tribute Panel from MCM London, right here on Popverse
• My Dress-Up Darling was one of my all-time favorite romance anime - until I read the manga

The Fantastic Four are finally coming to the MCU - just not the MCU as we know it.

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has revealed new details about the 2025 Fantastic Four movie, confirmingly not only when it takes place, but also where - or at least where it isn't.

"Yes, very much so it's a period [piece]," Feige says in response to a question about it being set in the '60s during the June 26 edition of The Official Marvel Podcast. "And there was another piece of art we released with Johnny Storm flying in the air, and making a '4' symbol. There was a cityscape in the corner of that image, and there were a lot of smart people who noticed that that cityscape didn't look exactly like the New York we know (or existed) in the '60s in our world. And those were smart observations, I'll say."

As you can see from the image here (or cropped for detail above), the cityscape is an idealized futuristic one - the kind of future that American culture in the '60s popularized in what later became known as retrofuturism.

So, does this mean that the FF movie will be set in another Earth elsewhere in the multiverse, or are there some other kinds of time travel and reality-altering shenanigans going on? We'll have to wait a year or so before finding out.

Feige goes on to say that the Fantastic Four are "legendary pillars" of Marvel that Marvel Studios were never able to play with before now aside from a few teases. This is due to Marvel selling off the Fantastic Four rights in 1994 to 20th Century Fox - and those only returning in 2019 when Marvel Studios' parent company Disney bought the studio. Aside from Mr. Fantastic's cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (as played by John Krasinski, and not Pedro Pascal, who's playing the character in the FF movie; the multiverse is a wild thing, after all) and a few fun teases before, Marvel Studios hasn't gotten to play with the Fantastic Four in a significant way - until now.

Fantastic Four is scheduled to hit theaters July 25, 2025.

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights: Disney CEO Bob Iger is promising Deadpool & Wolverine will be MCU's biggest movie "in a long time", how Marvel Studios is now working "much more closely" to sell Marvel comics, how Marvel Comics' boss said it was lost in 2023 (and how its finding itself again), Inside Marvel Comics' plans to fix its pricing issues, Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak, and the biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows.