'The Fantastic Four' could have been a great American movie

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.