Marvel Sets ‘Fantastic Four’ Cast: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn

The film is also swapping release dates with “Thunderbolts”

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Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn (Getty Images)

Marvel Studios offered up a Valentine’s Day present for fans: the cast of “The Fantastic Four.”

The studio announced, via an adorable, Valentine’s Day-themed Instagram post, that the reboot will star Pedro Pascal (as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman), Ebon Moss-Bachrach (as Ben Grimm/The Thing) and Joseph Quinn (as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch).

Additionally, Disney announced on Wednesday that “Thunderbolts” and “The Fantastic Four” are now swapping release dates, with “Thunderbolts” opening two months earlier on May 2, 2025 and “The Fantastic Four” hitting theaters on July 25, 2025.

Matt Shakman, no stranger to the Marvel Cinematic Universe after directing all of “WandaVision,” will be directing the project from a script that has seen writers Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer and Josh Friedman, all contribute.

“The Fantastic Four” was announced at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, with John Krasinski playing a version of Reed Richards from another dimension in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” (He didn’t last long.) Originally “Spider-Man: Homecoming” director Jon Watts was tapped to direct this new take on the beloved characters, but in 2022 he announced that he was dropping off the project, citing superhero fatigue (this time the fatigue was making them not watching them).

The last time the characters, who are a family of scientists that gain superpowers after being exposed to radiation on a mission in outer space, were properly brought to the screen was Josh Trank’s disastrous “Fantastic Four” back in 2015. While Trank was going for a darker, more body horror-focused version on the usually lighthearted material, the production was (by all accounts) an absolute nightmare and the movie, made for $120 million, only made $167 million at the global box office.

Before that there were two goofy “Fantastic Four” movies directed by Tim Story (co-starring future Captain America Chris Evans as the Human Torch) and, of course, their was the infamous, unreleased Roger Corman version of the characters that was made in 1994 but only so executive producer Bernd Eichinger could retain control of the characters.

“Thunderbolts,” which originally had the July 2025 slot, is a super villain team-up movie to be directed by Jake Schreier and starring Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Soldier), Hannah John-Kamen (Ghost), Wyatt Russell (U.S. Agent), Florence Pugh (Yelena Belova aka Black Widow), David Harbour (Red Guardian) and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). Instead of Nick Fury rounding them up, it’ll be Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) assembling the squad.

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