It’s no surprise that the first teaser for The Fantastic Four: First Steps scored 202 million views in its first 24 hours online: it’s a darn good teaser that lets the striking individual personalities of these characters breathe while demonstrating an enjoyable retro ’60s-infused atmosphere distinctly different from other Marvel Studios projects. This Fantastic Four teaser is so good that it pushes out the memories of prior Fantastic Four movies from people’s minds. Audiences aren’t inquiring whether or not First Steps can offer something new compared to its predecessors, they’re just focused on the future.

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One bizarre detail about the First Steps trailer, though, is that it arrived just a few days after the 10th anniversary of 2015’s Fantastic Four dropping its first teaser. Only a decade separates these two trailers, yet they seem to have come from different realities given their radically different approaches to the titular superhero team. While the eventual Josh Trank directorial effort Fant4stic was no good, it has to be said that this teaser was surprisingly solid. In fact, it promised a more introspective and chilling movie than the final product could ever hope to deliver.

What Did the Fantastic Four Teaser Entail?

This first teaser almost entirely focuses (in terms of dialogue) on voice-over narration from Reg E. Cathey’s Franklin Storm. This famous performer’s terrific voice is a grand way to instantly instill a sense of gravitas into the teaser, with images of New York City and grasslands resonating as Franklin contemplates “How did we get this far?” As the teaser progresses, viewers see pieces of footage focused on individual Fantastic Four members (like Reed Richards and Ben Grimm). These establish the interior lives of these superheroes before one fateful trip to space (or another dimension in this movie) changes things forever.

Gradually, the score becomes more and more ominous as Fantastic Four’s teaser focuses on the four leads as they get used to their new powers. “But with every new discovery,” Franklin Storm ruminates, “There is risk, there is sacrifice, and there are consequences.” With every new word, increasingly ominous imagery appears onscreen, like Richards crawling his way through a fiery landscape, Johnny Storm lighting on fire at the end of a hallway littered with corpses, and some “thing” beginning to emerge from a pile of rock. What sounds like a faint siren plays repeatedly on the soundtrack as the teaser builds up to the title reveal.

It’s all very creepy and in line with Trank’s pre-release proclamations that his vision of the Fantastic Four would be more in line with body horror than an Avengers movie. Of course, a concession to conventional superhero entertainment is delivered at the end of Fantastic Four’s teaser when the titular superhero team is shown up gazing up at a space laser beam – a scene that could’ve been lifted from The Avengers or Suicide Squad. As a standalone piece of art, this Fantastic Four teaser is reasonably eerie and gets a lot of mileage out of Reg E. Cathey’s impeccable voice-over work.

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The Final Fant4stic Film Didn’t Align With This Teaser

It’s amusing, in hindsight, just how inaccurate this teaser trailer was in representing Fantastic Four. For one thing, the climactic shot of the teaser is nowhere to be found, while that big cosmic laser beam manifests in a radically different way in the final film. Meanwhile, some of the most evocative wide shots of this teaser depicting Johnny Storm tending to a body in a hallway or driving a car on a country road didn’t make it into the final cut. After all the reshoots and post-production chaos, 2015’s Fantastic Four largely deploys bland cramped imagery, not the grander vistas of this teaser.

Then there’s the absence of scenes like Ben Grimm playing baseball in the daytime, which shows how character-centric moments from this feature ended up on the cutting room floor. Even Cathey’s Franklin Storm has only a fleeting presence in the final film, with too much of the dialogue going to tin-eared lines from the four leads, rather than Storm delivering grandiose ruminations on humanity. Even the eerie tone of this teaser is largely absent from the final product. There’s certainly nothing to chill you to the bone during its rudimentary CG-heavy finale.

The Fantastic Four teaser from ten years ago is now a tragic piece of pop culture nostalgia. The disparity between this teaser and the final film demonstrates how far a movie can stray during production and what endless studio executive meddling can produce. At least this solidly evocative teaser trailer came out of this creative boondoggle. Better still, the Fantastic Four: First Steps teaser offers hope to die-hard fans of these Marvel Comics mainstays that a proper feature film adaptation of these characters could be just around the corner.

2015’s Fantastic Four is now streaming on Disney+.