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If there’s one thing that Marvel Studios has successfully established across its 16 years, it’s a visual aesthetic than spans across its entire output, regardless of whatever greater genre the specific project is intended to be servicing. There’s a slickness and consistency that blankets all of Marvel’s on-screen stories that outlasts and overpowers individual director’s styles in favor of the greater good that is the MCU as a monolithic narrative entity… and, according to those involved, next year’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps is about to break that streak. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have Syd Mead to thank for this.

The MCU looks like the MCU

There are arguments to be made for and against the idea that Marvel’s on-screen identity is so unchanging across its entire existence to date. While there have been outliers — hi, Chloe Zhao’s Eternals! I see you, Ryan Coogler’s first Black Panther (well, up until the final act)! — Marvel movies tend to look so similar in their on-screen aesthetic and directorial decisions that it’s become something of a running joke amongst fans and critics alike. While there’s certainly no grand defense against the idea that it’s a bad thing to stifle individual voices’ creativity in favor of a purposefully consistent style, it shouldn’t be ignored that, for much of the MCU’s core audience, the consistency and reliability is the entire point of the exercise: the idea that everyone knows exactly what they’re going to get when they put down their dollars at the box office, no questions asked.

None of this should be taken as a criticism of the fine work done by Marvel’s design department, led by head of visual development Ryan Meinerding. (A man who, deservedly, has an entire book devoted to his work establishing the look of the studio over the past decade-plus.) Synthesizing more than eight decades of work from hundreds if not thousands of artists into something that looks as if it belongs in the same world is no small feat, and Marvel arguably deserves more plaudits than it’s received for doing such a good job of streamlining and combining the design aesthetics into one whole.

And yet… having such a strong hand on the look of a franchise that’s gone beyond 30 movies by this point does run the risk of boring the audience, especially after close to two decades. Starting afresh in some way certainly seems like a good idea.

Mid-century modern

From what has been said by those attached to the movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is going to feature a whole different look from other Marvel Studios productions — something that the sizzle reel shared in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con 2024 certainly underscored. In harkening back to design from the mid-20s century, the new movie doesn’t just get to pay homage to the era the movie’s core characters were initially created in, but also establish a new visual language for Marvel to play with that’s unrestricted by the quasi-realism and grounded nature of the regular MCU.

A figure that’s been mentioned by director Matt Shakman and others as being influential to this new aesthetic is Syd Mead, which is simultaneously unsurprising and unlikely to movie fans. Mead, who passed in 2019, is inarguably one of the most influential designers of genre cinema, having worked on everything from Blade Runner and Tron through to Elysium, Tomorrowland, and Mission: Impossible III. He was the man who came up with the look of the AT-AT in The Empire Strikes Back, and who contributed to the incomplete sequel to Space Battleship Yamato, as well as Aliens, Short Circuit, and, somewhat less memorably, Timecop.

Mead’s work is a touchstone in genre cinema, and picking him up as an inspiration for F4 makes sense (not least because Mead famously described himself as a futurist, and Reed Richards similarly thinks of himself that way). That said, Mead’s work doesn’t share much of a visual link to that of Jack Kirby, the co-creator and primary visual stylist of the comic book Fantastic Four. Does this mean the cinematic F4 will be lacking that Kirby feel, or will he be part of the mix as well in some as-yet-unacknowledged manner?

The multiversal makeover

What The Fantastic Four: First Steps offers Marvel — and something that they’re seemingly grabbing with both hands — is the possibility that different multiversal realities offer different visual aesthetics to play with. Just because the regular MCU looks like it does doesn’t mean that other realities can’t look entirely different and new in ways that can be surprising and exciting to viewers. In that we have just a handful of years left in the MCU’s ‘Multiverse Saga,’ let’s hope that Marvel will take full advantage of the possibilities for injecting some new visual life into the MCU as a whole… and that some of it sticks around after the Multiverse has gone away, as well.

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

• Marvel Studios has accidentally created a new Phase that predates Phases 1 - 6: the MCU Phase Zero
• Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak
• The biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows
• Donald Trump is the landlord for Marvel's House of Ideas
• Marvel Studios swapping out Doctor Doom for Kang offers the chance to jettison the Multiverse Saga
• What Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is saying (and not saying) about the MCU X-Men franchise says a lot about the future of the Mutant Saga
• If Marvel is going to bring Loki back for Secret Wars, it's time to give him an upgrade
• With Daredevil, and spinoffs from Black Panther, What If, and more, Marvel Studios' 2025 Disney+ slate is bigger than ever, and that might be a big deal for the future
• If Kraven the Hunter flops, Sony's Spider-Man Universe could look for a Marvel-assisted reboot
• In 2021, Sony's boss said people won't miss Spider-Man in its Spider-adjacent movie. Turns out, they do.