'Fantastic Four' Created Social Media Backlash After Releasing Its First Teaser And Poster

05/02/2025

The Fantastic Four is a superhero team created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, with several film adaptations over the years.

The first major adaptation, Fantastic Four (2005), follows the team's origin story, where they gain superpowers after exposure to a cosmic storm and later battle Doctor Doom. The film was shot way before Chris Evans is later known as Captain America in his later Marvel films.

The film was followed by a sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), where the team faces the Silver Surfer and the cosmic entity Galactus. Both films were commercially successful, though they received mixed critical reviews.

In 2015, the franchise was rebooted with a younger cast in Fantastic Four. However, the film failed both critically and commercially, widely regarded as a misstep for the series.

Now, with Hollywood embracing the trend of superhero reboots, Fantastic Four attempts yet another revival. However, the backlash started early—criticism emerged the moment the first teaser and poster were released.

When the first teaser trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps was released to the public, fans were immediately divided.

The upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film, starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn, debuted a teaser that surprisingly didn’t feature any of the lead actors. Instead, the teaser shows a group of people, including four children, rushing toward a storefront where a television displays footage of the Fantastic Four’s space shuttle launch.

At first, everything seems normal. Viewers hear the sound of children giggling in the background—until they notice something odd.

The same giggle plays three times, in a clip that is only 20 seconds long.

This reveals that it's just a looped laugh track.

This seemingly small detail has sparked heated discussions on social media, with some fans questioning the teaser’s execution while others defend its artistic choices.

Then, the teaser disappeared.

In its place Marvel put a second teaser, but a proper one this time.

Unfortunately, things didn't stop there.

As soon as the first poster the film was released, eagle-eyed internet users spotted some weird things on it.

Fantastic Four: First Steps film has a very distinct vibe, which depicts a retro-inspired vibe of the 1960s, but packed in a futuristic feel.

This is shown in the poster itself, which showcases a crowd people cheering.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

But in it, there are at least two women with the same face in the promotional poster that was released shortly with its first proper teaser. This can be a designer issue, where the creators of the poster took shortcuts to cut down cost and speed up projects. This is nothing new, and have happened in the past.

The second issue however, is quite unique.

The poster also shows people with four fingers, instead of the normal five. This is something only Large Language Models would occasionally do.

Internet users flooded social media platforms like X and Bluesky with posts to highlight the poster’s strange details and anomalies, and accusing Marvel of using AI to create the promotional art instead of hiring humans.

I'll add a couple... The only real Marvel in this effort is that someone signed it off.

[image or embed]

— John Moore (@ondrive.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 11:37 PM

A spokesperson responded to this by saying that the allegation is not true.

The negative reactions to the posters come at a time when more and more studios and films are implementing AI into their workflow.

Most recently, Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist came under fire for rumors that the production team used AI to enhance the film’s dialogue.

Director Brady Corbet denied the allegations, saying that stars Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones worked for months with a dialect coach to perfect their characters’ Hungarian accents, and that only the Hungarian portions of the film were adjusted manually using Respeecher technology.

Respeecher is a Ukrainian software company that develops speech synthesis software enabling people to speak in the voice of another particular person using AI.

"The aim was to preserve the authenticity of Adrien and Felicity’s performances in another language, not to replace or alter them and done with the utmost respect for the craft," Corbet said.