Following the release of Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts*, Marvel Studios rounded out its run on the 2025 movies schedule with The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Besides taking place on an alternate, ‘60s retro-futuristic Earth, one of the other ways the latest Fantastic Four movie stood out from its predecessors was by delivering a faithful adaptation of Galactus. Now Ralph Ineson, who played the Devourer of Worlds, has shared a cheeky response to some criticism directed at his MCU character from Rob Liefeld, the co-creator of Deadpool.
This started on X when a fan account posted a crisp gif of Galactus walking through New York City while his suit engulfed is engulfed in flames, though this doesn’t bother him because he’s, well, one of the most powerful entities in existence. Liefeld posted that this moment looks “so fake” and that the “Marvel FX fell off a cliff,” prompting Ralph Ineson to say this in his own X post:
Rent free 😂
This is indeed another example of something from The Fantastic Four: First Steps living “rent free” in Rob Liefeld’s head, as Ineson put it. On Tuesday, July 31, he shared a photo of a mostly empty 5 pm IMAX screening of the 37th MCU movie and wrote that there was “very little repeat biz on this film” because it’s “impossibly dull & boring.” However, this has been par for the course in the last few years when it comes to Liefeld and Marvel-related things.
Liefeld, who created Deadpool with Fabian Nicieza and is also well known on the Marvel front for working on titles like The New Mutants and X-Force, has been on the outs with this subsidiary of Disney since this past February. The writer/artist shared that when he attended the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere in July 2024 with his family, they were not invited to the afterparty and were ignored by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and other Disney officials. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for Liefeld after he’d had issues with Marvel in 2023, and he cut ties with the company.
All this is to say that Rob Liefeld is not Marvel’s biggest fan at this stage of his life, and he certainly didn’t care for The Fantastic Four: First Steps. He’s by no means alone with that, as our own Eric Eisenberg rated the movie 2.5 out of 5 stars in his The Fantastic Four: First Steps review. But for the most part, the debut of the MCU’s take on Marvel’s First Family has been met with positive critical reception, boasting an 86% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes and a 90% Popcornmeter.
For those who’ve made it this far but still haven’t seen The Fantastic Four: First Steps, don’t worry, as it can now be streamed with a Disney+ subscription. We’ll see Pedro Pascal’s Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby’s Invisible Woman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Thing and Joseph Quinn’s Human Torch back in action for Avengers: Doomsday in December 2026, but it’s hard to say when or even if Galactus will resurface since he and Silver Surfer were banished to parts unknown.
