The Fantastic Four’s Earth-828 Is the Perfect Home for a Rebooted MCU Avengers

If the comics are any kind of indication, then at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars, it’s likely that our young godlike character, Franklin Richards, will unite the fragments of the various timelines, into a new singular reality. This reality will be the new “main” MCU Earth. And we still think that’s likely what’s going to happen. But what if one of those other timelines survived intact? We think it’s possible that the FF’s Earth-828 might continue in some form, becoming the home of the most iconic Avengers in new iterations, each with new actors playing them. And the world they inhabit would be very different from the one that Iron Man first appeared in back in 2008.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps introduced us to a world where a “New Horizons” future already existed in the 1960s. But it’s not a fully formed world just yet. The production design of the film shows a world that is a mix of retrofuturism, together with one still very familiar. The New York skyline is a mix of the Jetsons look alongside buildings resembling those from our real world of that era. We assume Reed Richards was a man way ahead of his time, introducing tech into his world decades before it did in the main universe.

But the future of Earth-828 (in other words, a world adjacent to our present) could be a game-changer. It would be a world where that retrofuturism, pioneered by Reed Richards, has firmly taken root. In the year 2030, or whenever these films come out, could be a truly alternate Earth where futuristic technology has taken hold, creating a starkly different world from our own. We wouldn’t say Star Trek levels of technology, but something pretty close. After all, if Reed Reechirds had FTL “faster than light” spaceships in 1964, wouldn’t they be commonplace in that Earth’s future/our present? An alt-Earth like this one might be the perfect place to give us new versions of Marvel’s most famous heroes, existing in an entirely new context.

Marvel Comics pulled off something similar in the early 2000s, when they introduced their Ultimate Universe. After forty years, their mainline universe had become overwhelmed by complex continuity, and sales were suffering. But instead of deleting the old (still beloved) continuity, they created an adjacent world where younger versions of Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Avengers, now renamed the Ultimates, existed. For years, these new versions of classic characters sold like crazy, often outperforming the classic 616 Marvel Universe comics. It’s been a huge influence on both the MCU and the Fox X-Men franchise. Now, it could influence it in another significant way.

These days, the MCU is currently in a similar predicament as the comics were at the turn of this century. The mainline continuity has become unruly for general audiences over the past 17 years. It’s all weighed down by 37 movies and over 20 television series (and counting). But many of those movies and shows remain beloved, and have become a big part of pop culture. Taking them off the table would anger way too many devoted fans. But keeping an adjacent universe solely for new versions of the most iconic Avengers solves that problem. It’s the “have your cake and eat it, too” solution. It worked for the comics, so why not for the MCU?

This allows the 616 universe to keep chugging along, presumably with X-Men and mutants, and possibly supernatural heroes, all taking a much larger role. But maybe in the Sacred Timeline, it’s time to leave the concept of the Avengers as a team behind. Let new versions of Iron Man, Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner, Thor, and Black Widow emerge in “similar yet different” variants. Much like the Ultimates series, you would introduce Iron Man, Cap, Hulk, Thor, etc., as a unit. No individual movies needed. We all know the basics now for each character, they don’t require introductory movies.

Of course, depending on how each character is received, that could determine if they get solo spin-offs later. Much like The Ultimates, their existence on another Earth wouldn’t invalidate the 616-Avengers or their history, as this would be a new version of something similar. And it could even connect to the previous version at some point. Think of the way Spider-Man: No Way Home connected all the Spideys. But at first, it would be its own separate reality, a new version of Earth, where the sky’s the limit in terms of storytelling.

It stands to reason that Disney/Marvel doesn’t want to let go of Iron Man/Tony Stark, Captain America/Steve Rogers, Thor, Bruce Banner/Hulk, Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, and others. Even the actors who are not done playing those characters at the moment, specifically Chris Hemsworth and Mark Rufallo, are going to age out of playing Thor and Hulk eventually. And these are all Marvel’s most recognizable heroes that aren’t Spider-Man. Disney is simply not going to let Marvel Studios shelve them forever. Placing new versions of these characters in their own new universe might just be the best solution. And it could inject just the right excitement into the MCU that it desperately needs right now.