The Fantastic Four , Marvel’s comic that launched the Marvel age of comics in the early 1960s, is getting a new film. It’s slotted to release in 2025, and will be the fourth filmed attempt to bring Reed Richards, Susan Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm (Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and the Thing) to the big screen.

The first three Fantastic Four movies failed because they did not present the story as what it always has been: an explicitly conservative celebration of American family and military against the enemies of groupthink and totalitarianism.

The first Fantastic Four comic appeared in 1961. It was influenced by Kennedy’s New Frontier, with intact families, a strong economy, anti-communism, and American pride in the space program.

Marvel giants and Fantastic Four creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby came down on the side of America and the family, particularly against the superheros’ nemesis Doctor Doom. Doom was a dictator from the Soviet block-sounding country of Latveria, a fictitious creation of Stan Lee, which nonetheless is based on the Soviet-controlled countries of Eastern Europe.

Doom’s one demand is that his subjects be happy — even if they have to be forced. The frozen smiles of the people of Latvia were a direct commentary on the coercive evil of communism. And Jack Kirby’s art was a celebration of the human form in action as well as an awesome immersion into the astonishing wonders of outer space.

Driven by the increasingly oppressive darkness of the Batman model, comics have lost so much of the pure, pro-American joy that once made Marvel so beloved by fans.

In the comics of the 1960s, there was humor, patriotism, romantic love that resulted in marriage and children, and moments of pure optimism. Jack Kirby is acknowledged as a genius, but it’s often overlooked that he was the funniest comic book artist who ever lived. Lee and Kirby were both veterans of World War II, so their stories did have realism. Reed Richards, Susan and Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm argued and got irritated with each other, but their lives were also filled with humor and the love of freedom.

If the showrunners of the planned new Fantastic Four movie keep this in mind, they could make the film another Top Gun: Maverick.

The first Marvel films tapped into this winning formula. In 2008’s Iron Man, hero Tony Stark (Robbert Downey, Jr.) is a genius inventor and industrialist who had become rich in manufacturing weapons. Early in the film Stark is confronted by a reporter from Vanity Fair. “Let me guess — Berkeley?” Stark replies when she accuses him of being a “merchant of death” and war profiteer.

“The day that weapons are no longer needed to keep the peace, I’ll start making bricks and beams for baby hospitals,” Starks said. He added, “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy,” noting that several technological breakthroughs that aided humanity came directly from military research and funding.

This exchange with the liberal reporter in Iron Man had an interesting recent real-life analog.

At the 2017 New York comic convention, Marvel Entertainment announced it would be partnering with defense giant Northrop Grumman to produce a one-shot comic book. The comic, which would feature a team of Northrop Grumman-themed heroes, was aimed at encouraging young people to go into STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math] fields.

However, Marvel was flooded with responses to the tweeted announcement, the vast majority of them negative. Many comparisons were made between this event and the movie version of Iron Man, a billionaire CEO of a weapons company who, after seeing the effects his weapons have on innocents, turns his company away from developing weapons.

Bowing to the Soviet mob, Marvel canceled the event. In a statement to pop-culture site Polygon.com , Marvel said, “The activation with Northrop Grumman at New York Comic Con was meant to focus on aerospace technology and exploration in a positive way. However, as the spirit of that intent has not come across, we will not be proceeding with this partnership including this weekend’s event programming. Marvel and Northrop Grumman continue to be committed to elevating, and introducing, STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] to a broad audience.”

Writing at Defense News , Aaron Mehta noted that Comicon was a bad place to launch the initiative, as comic conventions tend to attract more liberal and “reactive” attendees.

Mehta also noted the hypocrisy of the left-wing critics of comics: “To be fair, there is some dissonance here. Marvel fans have no problem rooting on the X-Men, who famously fly around in a modified SR-71 Blackbird ; one of the characters has a pet dragon literally named Lockheed. Iron Man may have renounced his defense industry profits, but he still flies around in an up-armored robotic suit and at one point served as U.S. secretary of defense.”

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.