Marvel's First Family is back — and somehow more boring than ever.
In this week's episode of The Economy of Nothing, Mike and Mike break down the new Fantastic Four (2025), a film that manages to be ambitious, confused, and shockingly uneventful all at once.

They dig into the movie's strange pacing, Reed Richards' complete lack of stretching, and the bizarre decision to open with a pregnancy test. The conversation also covers Marvel's ongoing identity crisis, the era of reshoots-as-plot, and why every scene now feels written for people who are only half watching.

The episode expands beyond the movie into larger questions about the state of the MCU, the future of superhero storytelling, and how modern blockbusters keep solving their problems by talking instead of showing.

Highlights include:

• Why Reed Richards never stretches (and what that says about the script)

• Galactus looking weirdly small for a "planet eater"

• The Silver Surfer thirst subplot no one asked for

• The car-seat scene that broke both of us

• Marvel's post-Endgame identity crisis

• Disney's algorithmic content era and what's coming next

By the end, the question isn't just whether Fantastic Four works — it's whether the MCU still knows what it wants to be.