There were no Fantastic 4 cardboard cutouts to take a picture with so I was worried about what I should post and then LOOK AT THAT POPCORN BUCKET!

This kind of feels like another mile marker of 2025 gone by.

I had been anticipating the Fantastic 4 movie since the beginning of the year.

It felt so far away for so long and then - boom - it’s here and now it’s over.

We went to see the movie Sunday afternoon.

I thought it was great.

I know I’m an easy audience. I generally want to like something if it’s within the realm of things I like, so we’re starting from a good place most of the time.

So it’s hard for me to say “You’ll love it!” to someone else because I don’t know whether it’s truly a great movie or just a movie that I really liked.

But I will tell you why I liked it.

I have no idea why I know about the Fantastic 4. As I’ve said many times before - we weren’t huge comic book readers. But I guess we had those little Marvel trading cards I’ve told you about before, and I guess the Fantastic 4 appeared in other comics we actually read, like the occasional Spider-Man.

But for some reason I know about Reed Richards and his stretchiness and Sue Storm and her invisibility and Johnny Storm/the Human Torch and The Thing, and I even knew his name was Ben Grimm.

But that’s neither here nor there with this movie - they do a nice job of quickly summarizing the origin story before launching into the plot of this movie.

I can’t say this movie wasn’t formulaic - it followed a lot of the same format of the typical Marvel movie.

But it felt different.

There was definitely a tension at certain points, even if you kind of knew how things were going to turn out.

But even though I was able to predict what was going to happen when it got right down to it…it was never unengaging. So I think that’s a pretty good sign it was a good movie.

The bad guy - Galactus - was one of the more convincing bad guys in recent Marvel memory.

And - I don’t think this spoils anything - just like Thunderbolts, there’s a great mid-credits scene. (Actually, in Thunderbolts it might have been a post-credits scene. I don’t remember.)

This was kind of the last movie highlight on the Marvel calendar for me for the foreseeable future.

I kind of hyped it up for myself, so I went in with rather high expectations.

It might have surpassed those expectations.

And it got me really looking forward to what’s next.