Last week I was away on assignment in San Diego. For that reason, I was not able to write about the opening weekend of The Fantastic Four: First Steps . But if I had, like many I would have noted the film’s $117.7 million debut was a positive sign for the MCU, offering the best launch for a “new” (relatively speaking) intellectual property at Marvel Studios since Captain Marvel in 2019. If you wanted to view the Fantastic Four IP in its larger, fuller context, First Steps still opened more than $90 million higher than the dire Fan4stic in 2015, which crashed stateside with a meager $25.7 million a decade ago. An uptick of 78 percent for a reboot is definitely some kind of brand rehabilitation. So if audiences liked what they saw, the MCU was taking a bold first step away from

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