Ranking the Fantastic Four Movies From Worst to Best

Marvel’s First Family launches back onto the big screen this week with The Fantastic Four: First Steps – a retro-futuristic Jack Kirby-inspired endeavor that officially brings this pioneering comic book supergroup into the MCU. This isn’t the first Fantastic Four movie, of course; heck, it isn’t even the first Fantastic Four movie to feature Silver Surfer and Galactus as its villains. But it does, however, look like it will be the first FF flick to deliver the goods.

With Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben once again clobberin’ their way into our hearts, we’ve decided to rank the four (yes, four) Fantastic Four movies that came before this.

Where will The Fantastic Four: First Steps ultimately rank on this list? Well, we’ll need to give that a little bit of time, so that everyone gets a chance to see it and also to sidestep any possible recency bias. We do know that our reviewer, Clint Gage,

The 2005 Tim Story Fantastic Four film is…fine. It gets the quartet right as characters for the most part and offers up a serviceable full-costumed Dr. Doom, albeit with a villain arc that feels very Norman Osborn-esque from 2002’s Spider-Man. It’s an origin story that spends two-thirds of the movie dealing with the Four’s origin, though to be fair, no one was necessarily burned out on origins back in 2005 when Marvel franchises like Spider-Man and X-Men were still shiny and new. Where the movie is most lacking is in the third act, which falls flat as a climactic clash between our heroes and a rather low-blood sugar Doom. There’s nothing drastically wrong about this movie, even with its tweaks, but it’s also a rather unexciting outing. Still, it’s because this movie was a modest hit that we actually had, briefly, a Fantastic Four franchise.

1. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)

Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, and Michael Chiklis returned for this souped-up sequel, which allowed the Fantastic Four to exist as public-facing celebrity superheroes without having a lengthy origin story to bog things down. Aside from the new Phase 6 movie coming out, this is the only other Fantastic Four movie where we just get dropped into a lived-in FF universe where our heroes are beloved global champions. Sure, Rise of the Silver Surfer has Reed doing a silly, stretchy dance at his bachelor party, and it wasn’t confident enough to give us Galactus as Galactus (he appears as a cloud, which was the way superhero movies solved adversaries for a long time – see also: Green Lantern, Dr. Strange, the Loki series, etc.), but it was also a better team adventure than the first film, even borrowing a bit from Superman II by having Dr. Doom remain as a secondary antagonist to the new cosmic threat.

Which is your favorite past Fantastic Four movie? Let us know down below…

Matt Fowler is a freelance entertainment writer/critic, covering TV news, reviews, interviews and features on IGN for 17+ years.