Playing one of the coolest comic-book characters ever, Julia Garner shines in all silver and chrome in Marvel’s new “Fantastic Four” flick.
The CinemaCon crowd got only a few glimpses of Garner’s take on the iconic Silver Surfer – her riding a galactic surfboard is a joy to behold – but it was one of the highlights of Marvel Studios’ presentation, which included new footage from “Thunderbolts*” (in theaters May 2) and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” (out July 25).
The exclusive look at “Fantastic Four” dug deeper into the story than February’s first trailer release. In a retrofuturistic landscape, astronauts Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Susan Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) went to space and came back changed heroes with superpowers – Reed’s super-stretchy, Sue can turn invisible, Johnny’s a human torch and Ben’s now a rock monster known as the Thing. (Though he does like cooking with H.E.R.B.I.E., their robot.)
Sue reveals that she’s pregnant, with Johnny telling her she’ll be a great mom but he’s jokingly kind of unsure about Reed as a dad. All four have a close bond and the world loves them, which is when the Silver Surfer, a herald of Galactus, arrives and warns that Earth has been “marked” by her gigantic planet-devouring boss (played by Ralph Ineson).
The footage didn’t show Galactus in full but did feature the back of his head looking down at the Statue of Liberty, as the Fantastic Four scrambles to deal with this cosmic threat and calm the worried public.
Thunderbolts ready for battle in ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ and their own movie
The FF isn’t wasting any time diving into the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe: Pascal, Kirby, Quinn and Moss-Bachrach were among the many actors announced last week – via director’s chairs and a livestream – to be starring in “Avengers: Doomsday.”
Marvel president Kevin Feige sent a video message to CinemaCon saying that “many, not all” of the cast has been announced and confirmed that the aforementioned quartet as well as the Avengers, Thunderbolts, Wakandans and original X-Men from the 2000s movies will join forces to take on Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr.).
Some of the Thunderbolts made the trip to the convention of theater owners to give a teasing taste of their upcoming movie. The sequence showed Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), U.S. Agent John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) crashing through a building lobby in a van and fighting random bad guys. Then the voice of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) chimes in and says, “I left the front door open.”
They go up to see her, and it turns out they’re in what used to be Tony Stark’s Avengers Tower, which Valentina has bought for “the optics.” She originally brought them together so they’d kill each other, but they ended forming a team. And she’s rather irked by their presence: Valentina makes fun of Winter Soldier for not even lasting half a term in Congress (he was running for election in “Captain America: Brave New World”), tells Yelena she looks terrible, calls Walker “junior varsity Captain America” and dismisses Red Guardian altogether.
Ghost takes a swing at Valentina, but an unseen force stops the punch. You then see that Valentina has a powerful protector coming down some stairs, only from boot level though, so it’s unclear whether it’s Sentry (Lewis Pullman) or another surprise villain.
Before introducing the clip, “Thunderbolts*” actors pulled a gag where they stumbled into the Colosseum at Caesars Palace like they had just gotten lost in the casino. “We hope the movie does really well,” Louis-Dreyfus cracked, “so Wyatt Russell can get back the money he lost today.”
