After 25 years of market dominance, a slightly worn Marvel Studios is retreating to the swinging ’60s with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and it’s not the only cinematic universe turning to the mid-century for inspiration in the summer of 2025. Superman, for the first time in his spotty solo-movie run, is embracing the whackier sides of his mythos, bringing in Kryptonian dogs, robots, and monsters. After decades of avoiding the goofiness that initially attracted Baby Boomers to superhero comics, the film industry finally decided it was time for the Silver Age to head to the silver screen.
The Silver Age is the second major era in comic books, spanning from 1956 to 1970. Most comic book aficionados agree that the era began with the 1956 debut of the Barry Allen Flash in Showcase #4. Ironically, Superman was way ahead of them. After the Comics Code self-censorship that grew from Fredric Wertham’s comic-focused McCarthyism killed horror and romance titles, DC editor Julius Schwartz hoped to rejigger the imprint by attracting the kiddies lining up to see the George Reeves-led Superman And The Mole Men movie and Adventures Of Superman TV series that followed. By 1954, DC launched Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, the first of several books about Superman’s wider family aimed at young readers. Reader turnover is a perennial concern in the comics industry, as it is in the movie industry. The idea is generally to give audiences something fresh and familiar, and with Superman, they expanded outward.
Under editor Mort Weisinger, luminaries such as Otto Binder, Bill Finger, and Superman creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel reached out into the cosmos and brought back the scattered remnants of Krypton. Superman’s cousin Supergirl made it to Earth (and Superman promptly stuck her in an orphanage), as did Krypto The Super Dog. DC always found ways to bring Krypton back into the fold, both through Superman’s new ability to travel through time and via “Imaginary Stories,” which allowed writers to break continuity and explore what would happen if, say, Superman killed Ma and Pa Kent with poisonous pirate treasure. Superman’s Silver Age is delightfully daffy, with not one but two Super Apes making their way to Smallville and Metropolis.
A few years later, Marvel Comics, which had also felt the sting of horror comics’ decline, returned to superheroes. In 1961, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced the Fantastic Four, which shared many attributes with Superman at the time. However, Kirby and Lee balanced their sci-fi superhero spectacle with psychology, framing the stories more around the relationships of the First Family. The arguments between Ben Grimm and Reed Richards, for instance, serve as an outgrowth of Grimm’s post-mutation self-consciousness and his interpretation of Richards’ workaholism as just another example of Mr. Fantastic’s perfection.
Where DC aimed for imagination, Marvel went for relatability. The Four’s interpersonal struggles drove the stories: Grimm’s jealousy of Richards, and Johnny Storm’s lost love—the Inhuman Crystal—added a sense of tragedy to the comic that Silver Age stories about Lois Lane dating a pro wrestler named “Ugly Superman” lacked. But 25 years into the superhero movie trend, both franchises needed to look back to this era and find some of the freewheeling personality that made these books so fun in the first place.
The Silver Age offers different things to both Superman and The Fantastic Four, but this choice is all about giving both properties flavors that audiences haven’t tasted in a while. Certain Silver Age elements have long been cornerstones of Superman media, including General Zod, the Phantom Zone, and the Arctic Fortress of Solitude, but others, like Krypto The Super Dog and Superman’s robot assistants, have been left off-screen. This contributes to Superman’s movies being incredibly staid at this point. A third of his six movies are about Zod, and another third are about Lex Luthor’s real estate schemes. Granted, it’s challenging for audiences to relate to a character who is an alien, a god, and a bumbling reporter, which is why the best Superman movies focus on Clark Kent. However, the Silver Age stories expand Superman’s mythos so widely that they make him one of the more normal things on any given page. There’s hardly a human on Earth who can match Superman’s power, but a robot built by Superman or Bizarro Superman or a dose of Red Kryptonite, all of which debuted in the era, could make things a little more complicated. Still, it’s strange that it took 40 years of Superman movies for people to realize that simply giving him a dog would do the trick.
For Marvel, the Fantastic Four’s return to the ’60 is also a return to form for the cinematic universe. The team is faced with a similar dilemma as Superman: This is the group’s third franchise starter/restarter since 2005, and Marvel needs to give them a unique presentation to set them apart. Marvel rarely produces period pieces, with Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain Marvel being notable exceptions, but audiences have already seen the Fantastic Four on screen in the modern age—multiple times, in fact. The ’60s setting is an apt refresh, countering the long-standing criticism that Marvel movies lack visual pop. Just by virtue of its decade, this one has color.
Additionally, Fantastic Four is the Silver Age creation, blending Superman’s expansive science fiction with the grounded psychology that Marvel (and, much later, Marvel movies) would become known for. But, like Superman in the 1960s, Marvel Studios has shifted its focus away from the characters and instead concentrated on how far these characters could venture into the greater cosmos. The result has been a litany of CGI-heavy, intergalactic mixed bags that have degraded Marvel’s hit rate. With First Steps, Marvel can truly go back to basics, returning to the Baxter Building with their first family, decades before Tony Stark’s 2008 press conference. By separating from the wider MCU, Marvel can both drop some of the convoluted interconnectivity and return to what people liked in the first place: movies in which insecure mutants and humorless gods can bicker in New York City. They can even show Galactus this time.
The Silver Age was a revolutionary era in comics that is often overlooked or dismissed for its exploration of the limits of these characters. But in both the cases of Superman and the Fantastic Four, it’s a chance to reintroduce the inaugural characters of both brands, who are often criticized for being corny or cringeworthy due to their simplistic sense of duty and the sci-fi silliness that often surrounds them. A blend of sincerity and imagination is what made superhero stories work in the first place. Finally free of the gray skies and grim tones, Superman and the Fantastic Four can hit the screen—and their franchises—with a fresh coat of bright blue paint.