Why Doctor Doom isn't the villain in The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

Last Updated on April 12, 2025

The Fantastic Four: First Step will finally introduce Marvel’s first family to the MCU, but the film won’t include Doctor Doom as the main villain. Instead, we’ll finally get a comic-accurate take of Galactus the Devourer of Worlds. While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, director Matt Shakman explained why they didn’t go with Doctor Doom.

“Doom’s a great character, but he takes up a lot of air,” Shakman said. “Other film adaptations have done both an origin story and Doom. We’re doing neither, and that allows us to look at them from a fresh perspective.“

Although Doctor Doom won’t be featured in The Fantastic Four: First Steps (although I’d be shocked if Robert Downey Jr.’s take on the character didn’t show up in a post-credit sequence), the foursome will meet up with the good doctor in Avengers: Doomsday.

As Shakman mentioned, the other Fantastic Four movies have given Doom plenty of screen time, so it’s understandable that they would want to give Galactus his time to shine. The cosmic character appeared in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, but he was depicted as a giant cloud, which isn’t fun for anyone. In First Steps, Galactus is played by Ralph Ineson, who is wearing the character’s signature purple-and-blue armour. “I didn’t want to just use motion-capture for Galactus. I wanted to actually have someone there embodying the part,” Shakman said. “So we’ve built an entire costume for him, and we’ve done a lot of photography testing to figure out, How do you make sure that the scale is correct? How do you film Mount Rushmore?“

Pedro Pascal, who plays Reed Richards, added that Galactus “is definitely a scale of threat which Reed has never experienced. Even the smartest man in the world is awestruck by a being that outdates his understanding of time.” In addition to Pascal, The Fantastic Four: First Steps stars Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm, Ralph Ineson as Galactus, and Julia Garner as Silver Surfer. The film will hit theaters on July 25th.