
Fantastic Four's Director Addresses Why 1 Character Was Cut From The Film
"It's heartbreaking not to have him in the final movie."
Fans can finally see Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn as the Fantastic Four on the big screen, but not every character made the final cut for The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In May 2024, it was announced that John Malkovich was joining the star-studded cast in an unknown role, which was later confirmed to be supervillain Red Ghost. However, the Academy Award-nominated actor is nowhere to be seen in the movie that’s now in theaters.
Ahead of the film’s July 25 release, director Matt Shakman revealed that Malkovich would no longer appear in a sequence at the start of the film as Red Ghost, saying, “There was a lot of stuff to balance in this movie, and some things had to go.” At the Fantastic Four press junket in Los Angeles, Shakman tells Elite Daily, “It's heartbreaking not to have him in the final movie.”
Spoiler alert: The rest of this post discusses the beginning of The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
There is still a mention of Red Ghost, and one of the villain’s iconic Super-Apes still appears in a montage at the beginning, but Malkovich is completely MIA. Paul Walter Hauser is the only supervillain to make an appearance in the sequence as Mole Man.
Shakman admits that the final film went through a lot of changes, and the end result is a solid two-hour runtime (no bathroom breaks needed). That sadly means Malkovich wasn’t able to make his MCU debut, despite apparently turning in a great performance.
“He's brilliant, and the work that he did in this movie was extraordinary,” Shakman says. When asked if fans will ever get to see a director’s cut version with Red Ghost, he quickly unequivocally shut the notion down. “There are so many visual effects involved that those scenes remain unfinished, so that’s not possible,” he says.
There is still hope. On the chance that Malkovich could appear in a future Marvel project, Shakman says, “He's one of my favorite actors, one of my favorite people, and he really crushed it. So yeah, I hope so.”
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters now.