The Marvel Cinematic Universe is finally doing Galactus justice in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The movie depicts the Devourer of Worlds as a gigantic man in a sci-fi costume, much like in the original comic books, and he’s voiced by Ralph Ineson. To many fans, this feels like redemption after the way Galactus was depicted in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer in 2007, but Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige doesn’t see it that way. At a press roundtable attended by ComicBook on Sunday, Feige said that Galactus is perfectly in line with the MCU’s approach to adaptation.
“I never looked at it as redemption, but I did look at it as we had gotten to a point, and I hope the audience had gotten to a point, and people making decisions in studios have gotten to a point where the fear of something being silly is not a reason enough to not attempt it,” Feige said. “Even for us, going back, I think most things in comics are not silly. I think they’re cool, and I think it’s awesome to bring to life. Loki’s horns comes to mind when we were doing the first Thor, and that was many years ago now, and it had been a handful of years from the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer that had Galactus in it. And I thought, we don’t want to hide it. He’s got gigantic, almost makes no sense, huge horns, and we need to embrace that.“
Feige credited Tom Hiddleston with helping to bring Loki’s outlandish look to life, and he said that Ineson lends the same legitimacy to Galactus. “In Ralph, we have the same thing. So it is embracing that, and knowing that those designs are awesome. Those designs stand the test of time over and over and over again for a reason,” he said.
Ineson himself said that he didn’t consider the previous big-screen depiction of Galactus inspiration for his own performance, instead relying on the comics themselves. He also thought of the character as a force of nature, doing his best to get in the mindset of a being so large and powerful.
In Marvel Comics, Galactus is a massive being comprised mostly of cosmic energy, with powers on a scale that are difficult to even comprehend. With that in mind, it makes sense that past filmmakers were tempted to change the character so that he was even less human, but it turned out that fans didn’t want that. Like so many other times movies have tried to make comic book tropes more “serious,” this one rankled with long-time readers.
Hopefully, the MCU can strike a more satisfying balance. The Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters on Friday, July 25th.
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