Having been consistently building for the last 17 years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline is quite complicated... and the arrival of The Fantastic Four: First Steps doesn't exactly make things much clearer. Not only is the film set in a separate reality from the main continuity (Earth-828 vs. Earth-616), but it's also notably a period movie. Acknowledging this (particularly the latter), you may find yourself a bit confused about how everything lines up –especially with the big crossover planned in the upcoming Marvel movie Avengers: Doomsday – but we're here to save you from head-scratching activities with some clarity via director Matt Shakman.
CinemaBlend's Jeff McCobb sat down with the filmmaker during the Los Angeles press day for Fantastic Four: First Steps (as captured in the video at the top of this article), and one of the subjects discussed was the new 2025 blockbuster's complicated fit into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Thankfully, Shakman provided answers about both the when and the how of the whole thing.
00:00What year is it in that universe, and how does it align with the timeline of our Earth?
00:06So we're on Earth 828, named in honor of Jack Kirby and his birthday, August 28th.
00:12They are the only heroes on this planet.
00:14Thanks to the multiverse, we can tell these stories where it's a different corner of the Marvel storytelling universe.
00:21But, of course, they have a bright and brilliant future ahead of them in Avengers.
00:26So they will meet up, no surprise, no spoiler, with other characters that we know and love from the MCU and from Earth 616.
00:34But in terms of the year, we are purposefully vague about it.
00:39But when we were organizing ourselves from a design standpoint, it was 1965.
00:44This was the year that we used for clothing, for cars, for New York, in terms of referencing things.
00:52And that's really due to the fact that we wanted to be middle of the decade in terms of, you know, things start to change.
00:58You get to about more 70s as you get to the end of the 60s.
01:00And we didn't want it to feel too much vestigial 50s either.
01:04And so early 60s has that.
01:05So solidly in the middle, just kind of after the World's Fair in New York City, that was one of our touchstones, which was, you know, what if the World's Fair, you know, out in Queens was actually all over the city.
01:16You know, saucer-shaped buildings, monorails, flying cars, all that idea.
01:19In terms of your question, though, in their version of the world, they're in the 60s.
01:24But different universes are of different ages, right?
01:27And so when they cross over, they won't be time traveling.
01:31That's cool that that—and because the technology also implies that there's a vagueness to the time that they're living in and the way it correlates to ours.
01:38Which was the retrofuturism aspect of it.
01:40But even there was a groundedness to that, too, because Reed Richards, before he became Mr. Fantastic, was still the most brilliant person in the universe.
01:47And he's been a child prodigy, he was a child prodigy, so he's been Einstein meets Steve Jobs meets Robert Moses since he was very, very young.
01:55So his influence on the city, on architecture, on technology, Herbie robots and monorails and Fantasticars is, you know, pre-exists even his time as a member of the Fantastic Four.
02:05So that's what we were looking at, 60s from 1965 New York, but with a layer of Reed Richards over the last 15 to 20 years.
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