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I don’t have any way to prove it, but I’d bet money (up to $11) that over at Marvel movie headquarters there’s a big whiteboard upon which a phrase has been written and circled and underlined for the past several years:
How do we make Mr. Fantastic’s stretchy powers not look goofy af???
I genuinely don’t think there’s a way to pull off Mr. Fantastic’s body stretching powers in a live action movie without it looking really, really silly—I will provide evidence further down the page—which is why in the first trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps they showed us everyone using their powers except Reed.
I thought the new FF trailer that dropped this week was gonna pull the same move, but then, at the very end, we’re finally given a glimpse of hot super-zaddie Pedro Pascal, and he’s getting stretchy. A bit. A tiny bit. It’s a two-second shot and it’s in slow-motion so you don’t really get to see much stretchiness at all.
Look, Marvel, just show us. Show us a good long reel of Pedro Pascal with bendy noodle arms and a long floppy torso and legs that stretch all the way across the room. Let us see it in full. We’ll get our giggles out now and then when the movie releases in July we’ll be able to take your superhero family film as seriously as you seem to want us to.
I do sympathize with the CGI artists and animators who have to come to work every day and look at that underlined phrase on the whiteboard and then try their best to make a very stretchy man not look silly. In the comics, Reed Richards doesn’t usually look dumb when his arms and legs and torso get really long, but those are still frames where you don’t have to show what happens when, say, the top half of his body is stretched into one room while his legs are somehow supporting him around the corner:
fantasticfour from r/FantasticFour/comments/1g7l9sr/always_wondered_when_reed_leaps_into_action_like
And there are plenty of times when he does look dumb in the comics, like when his neck is super stretched and his arms are real skinny but his fists are huge, like in this actual image on the Marvel website. What a tool! If I could stretch I would never let anyone see me do it.
Then there’s the earlier Fantastic Four movies where I think it’s supposed to look goofy: if that was the goal in this clip from 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer where Reed dances, mission accomplished. In this clip from the 2015 reboot it’s pretty darn goofy too, especially the torso stretch to avoid a projectile while running. I think you should have just taken the shot, Miles Teller Reed. You’d be dead but you’d still have some dignity.
I haven’t played Marvel Rivals but this video of Mr. Fantastic in action looks fun as hell, but it also looks, y’know, pretty silly, what with his noodle-arms whipping around and his big inflated body poofing up when he wants to ground pound and goomba stomp. If Pedro Pascal jumps slowly up and down in place while inflated like a puffer fish, slamming one beachball-sized fist into the ground yelling “Faaaaantastic!” over and over, I will proclaim The Fantastic Four: First Steps the best movie of the year, sure—but it will be extremely goofy.
In this clip of Elastigirl in The Incredibles, we’re seeing probably the only time stretching has not only looked good but downright badass (except when she makes herself into a parachute or a boat in the first movie, which is pretty silly). But that’s animation, and it’s animation done by Pixar. It’s an extremely tall order to translate that to live action. And since we’ve only gotten two slow-motion seconds of stretchy Pedro Pascal so far, I’m guessing Marvel probably isn’t up to the task.
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Kurt Indovina
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