Marvel blew it. They had a chance to make The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the property that launched the Marvel Age of Comics in the 1960s, into a great pro-freedom, anti-communist movie. Instead, the fourth attempt to bring Reed Richards, Susan Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm to the big screen will be another CGI monster movie.
The antagonist this time is Galactus, a classic Marvel villain: a towering, purple entity that devours entire worlds. A better choice would have been Doctor Doom. Doom is the communist dictator of Latveria, a fictional country in Eastern Europe. In one of my favorite storylines of the original Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Fantastic Four (2005), Doom lures the four to Latveria and hypnotizes them so that they can’t use their powers.
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Doom demands that all his subjects smile all the time — after all, what could they have to complain about, when they are “provided everything?” Doom is a monarch, similar to the late Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s “King of Communism.” In the film The King of Communism: The Pomp & Pageantry of Nicolae Ceausescu (2002), we see a ruthless tyrant who surrounded himself with parades and castles and subjects forced to cheer his every move.
Doctor Doom would make for an especially potent villain in 2025, because he represents distinctly modern strains of communism: the desire to lift up Left-wing leaders as pseudo-gods (former President Barack Obama), the manipulation of science for evil purposes (transgenderism), and the desire to censor information that reflects poorly on the dictatorship (the mainstream media). The Fantastic Four wouldn’t even have to travel to Latveria to confront the enemy. The team’s traditional home of New York now has Zohran Mamdani in the lead in the race for mayor.
In making an explicitly anti-communist movie, Marvel could also back away from the woke casting and plots that have created critically drubbed bombs such as the recent Ironheart series. In his book All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told, Douglas Wolk revisits the villains of Marvel’s golden age in the 1960s: “Who do these heroes fight? As always, their enemies represent what American culture fears most — sinister entities lurking ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ (there’s a curious reluctance about naming Russia or China outright), or their agents (like the Black Widow, who is a Soviet spy in her earliest appearances, and her cat’s-paw, Hawkeye). Spider-Man fights a lot of inventors and scientists; Doctor Strange fights mystical forces. Doctor Doom, who eventually fights everyone, is most of those things at once and more, because he will take any kind of power he can get.”
In the first panel of his first appearance, Doom moves human-shaped figures on a chessboard, next to books labeled Demons and Science and Sorcery. That’s the modern Left in a nutshell.
The first three Fantastic Four movies failed, even the one featuring Doctor Doom, because they did not offer the heroes as a celebration of American family and power against the enemies of occult practice, pseudoscience, and groupthink. Doom was just an angry jerk, not a totalitarian mad scientist who had tapped into the dark arts.
The first Marvel film, 2008’s Iron Man, got the good guys and bad guys right. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is a genius inventor and industrialist who got rich by manufacturing weapons. Early in the film, Stark is confronted by a reporter from Vanity Fair. When she accuses him of being a “merchant of death” and war profiteer, Stark replies, “Let me guess — Berkeley?”
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“The day that weapons are no longer needed to keep the peace, I’ll start making bricks and beams for baby hospitals,” he adds. “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.”
Galactus is a great Marvel villain; he is visually stunning and mesmerizing in his cold menace. Then there is his herald, the Silver Surfer, who scans the cosmos for planets for him to feed on. In the hands of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, these became iconic characters. But they are only well-written 1950s monster movie villains, without the rich allegorical meaning that Doctor Doom brings. It’s amazing to contemplate, but in 2025, the biggest threat facing America and New York City is a guy who could be the next mayor.