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Breaking news: when movies have strong emotional themes, both audiences and critics respond to those films, and find they can take something away from them bigger than “I spent two hours in air conditioning and ate some popcorn.” Yet despite this pretty obvious idea that’s existed since the dawn of drama, it’s taken a while for superhero movies in particular to get around to this relatively straightforward premise. It isn’t the fights and tights that make the superheroes soar; it’s the human emotions. And particularly here in the first half (or so) of 2025, movies like Thunderbolts*, Superman, and Fantastic Four: First Steps are thrillingly figuring that out in real time.
Look, it’s not that themes haven’t existed before. Plenty of movies featuring men in capes have had strong ideas behind them. If you took a shot every time Batman Begins drove home it was about “fear,” you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning a third of the way through the movie. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was very purposefully about grief, given the shocking death of star Chadwick Boseman. Logan was (among other things) about legacy. Giving your superhero movie a strong emotional hook between explosions hasn’t been entirely absent from the genre… But over the past few years, comic-book movies have somewhat lost their way.
There are plenty of reasons that discussions of “superhero fatigue” have been ongoing for almost half a decade now, but one is the arms race to top every previous movie in terms of spectacle, at the expense of emotion. And then, thankfully, there are the superhero movies of 2025, here once again to save the day. Things got off to a rocky start with Captain America: Brave New World, which made nods towards the idea of politics without expressly saying anything about it. The closest Brave New World came to discussing an emotional theme was when Harrison Ford’s prospective President Ross stood in front of a big sign at the beginning of the movie that read “TOGETHER.” Not a theme, but at least it was something.
Forever friends
Things got on surer footing, though, with Thunderbolts* – a movie that announced its intentions right at the beginning thanks to narration from Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). She’s depressed. She doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life. She feels a void that, despite her best efforts to plug the hole with murder and alcohol, never seems to fill up. And instead of a pure villain, the team Yelena accidentally assembles is pitted against Bob (Lewis Pullman), a man who literally conjures up a void that swallows the team and New York City. Your mileage may vary on how successfully the movie brings home its themes – the team ultimately helps Bob deal with some extremely serious mental health issues with, once again, the idea of “what if… TOGETHER?” But it’s clear what the film is going for, and the small-scale ambition of depressed superheroes trying to be a little bit happier resonated with audiences that have been pummeled with disaster after disaster in the real world. Maybe the solution to the endless void of doom-scrolling alone, drunk on your bathroom floor, is indeed “together.” In this case, in a movie theater watching Thunderbolts*.
But the pair of movies released in July has excelled at thematic weight by looking to the most shocking of places: comic books from the 1960s. That era of endless innovation led to wild, non-stop ideas called The Silver Age. But it also set the tone for what heroism is, and should be, for generations to come. What director/writer James Gunn managed to do for Superman, and what director Matt Shakman and his team of writers did for Fantastic Four: First Steps, is take that unfettered imagination and meld it with modern views of emotion to bring us two movies that feel very present, even while they’re inspired directly by the past.
Flying high
Take Superman. There’s a lot going on in the movie, from Superman’s (David Corenswet) angst over his parents and origins, to actual politics (sorry, Brave New World) and billionaire manipulation of social media. But the ultimate takeaway from the movie is exactly what Gunn said it would be when he announced the film (then titled Superman: Legacy), and what he reiterated on wrapping the film. “I set out to make a movie about a good man in a world that isn’t always so much,” Gunn wrote on Instagram.
And that’s what Superman is about, a distillation of the superhero ethos of trying to be a good person when the world around you is constantly telling you to be anything but. How do you still do the right thing, when the wrong thing – or nothing – is so much easier? You’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who left the theater after seeing Superman who hasn’t said, “Maybe kindness is the real punk rock,” or some variation thereof, in the weeks since. In a world where we have constant pressures to quote-post and dunk, between the anti-proton rivers, 5th-dimensional imps, and social media monkeys, Superman drove home again and again: maybe just be kind, instead.
Shockingly, and spoilers past this point, Fantastic Four: First Steps shares a ton of DNA with Superman. Sure, it too has a big action scene built around trying to get the secondary bad guy sucked into a black hole. And First Steps is also about people being kind and hopeful and supporting each other. But the focus of the movie is, like Superman, about parenthood. The big difference is that instead of focusing on the kid, First Steps dives straight into the enormous, impossible responsibility of becoming a parent.
Family affair
In First Steps, we get Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), the smartest man alive, who can solve any problem, invent anything, thrust into a situation where he knows… nothing. The villain of the movie is ostensibly Galactus (Ralph Ineson), who is threatening to eat Earth to sate his unending hunger. But Galactus is just a representation of how impossible it is to prepare to be a parent. You can baby-proof the whole world like Reed, but ultimately, every child is different and special in their own way. Baby Franklin is a little more special than others, thanks to some cosmic powers. But Pascal’s most heartbreaking scene in the movie is where, alone, he confesses to Baby Franklin that he thinks there’s something wrong with him. And if you heard the sobs from every Dad in the audience who has had the same sort of confession to their kid, that privately they have no idea what they’re doing… well, you’re not alone.
Sure, First Steps ends in a climactic battle between Galactus and the Fantastic Four in New York City, the sort of spectacle we were referencing before. But it’s no coincidence that Sue beats Galactus by straining to push the bad guy through a hole in the universe. And she dies because of it, after earlier in the movie giving a beautiful speech about motherhood and her own mother. The moment following, where Baby Franklin lies on her chest while the rest of the team watch over her dead body, is devastating not because a cool superhero gave it their all to beat a bad guy, but because she died protecting her world.
Will this shocking trend of superhero movies driving home their emotional themes continue? It’s hard to say. In 2026, we’ve got Supergirl, which is based on the lauded graphic novel Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely. So if it sticks to the source material, the answer is going to be “yes” for that one. But on the Marvel side, we’ve got Avengers: Doomsday, a movie with approximately 600 characters that will almost assuredly lean on the side of spectacle. It may be too late for that one, but here’s hoping that as we move past this superhero fatigue hiccup, future films learn the lessons of Thunderbolts*, Superman, and Fantastic Four: First Steps… It works when the movie is relatable and human; not superhuman.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is out now in the UK, and on July 25 in America. For more, check out of Fantastic Four: First Steps review, and once you've seen the film read all about the exciting Fantastic Four: First Steps post-credits scenes.
