For nearly two decades, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been so prevalent in pop culture that their entire vibe has infected almost every facet of the creative output of Marvel as a larger comic-book and multimedia company. Projects like Crystal Dynamics’ ill-fated Avengers game forgo the source material’s comic book style for a photorealistic, sterile look evocative of the live-action films. The pendulum has swung in the opposite direction as of late, with games like Marvel Rivals and the upcoming Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls going a more stylized route, but even those games can’t escape the MCU-ification of their characters. For a long time, the Fantastic Four have been immune to such effects because the first family hasn’t been in the MCU. That’s about to change with Fantastic Four: First Steps, and fans have already noticed how characters like Mr. Fantastic are starting to resemble their live-action counterparts.
I hadn’t noticed it myself until my ex-coworker Mike Williams posted on Bluesky about how Reed Richards was starting to resemble Pedro Pascal in the card game Marvel Snap. Some of these newer card designs are direct tie-ins to the film and are labeled as such, but it does portend a day in which Pascal’s likeness and portrayal become the one the general public associates with the character, even outside the MCU.
We’ve seen this happen before. Iron Man sounds like Robert Downey Jr. in non-MCU media. Josh Keaton, who voices the armor-suit-wearing hero in projects like Marvel Rivals, even says that he weaves a bit of the actor’s mannerisms into his performance. Star-Lord, the once hardened leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy, has become pretty synonymous with Chris Pratt’s manchild version of the character since the 2014 film, and is typically portrayed as such in external media like the 2021 Guardians game.
Those are only a couple of examples, but there’s a laundry list of things the MCU changed that have funneled into the comics and other media. First Steps will premiere in two weeks, and until then, we don’t really know how Pascal’s version of Mr. Fantastic will differ from the classic brainiac version of the hero, but history tells us that he and the rest of the Fantastic Four may be portrayed differently after the film. Mr. Fantastic and the rest of his crew were long immune to this because it took nearly 20 years to introduce them to the MCU due to 20th Century Fox owning the film rights to the group, but Disney handled that the same way giant corporations always do: devouring it like a gaping maw.
Update: 7/10/25, 11:31 a.m.: Minutes after we published this story, Marvel Rivals announced a new set of skins based on First Steps in which Mr. Fantastic is looking a lot like Pascal. Sweet serendipity.