‘Fantastic Four’ Featurette Explores Superhero Origins

“What do you do when you wake up in the hospital bed and you’re made of rocks?” Jamie Bell gives us just one of the questions that will be answered in Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four reboot. The new featurette for the upcoming film explores the origins of our four superheroes and hits on their humanity and relatable qualities, which is something 20th Century Fox has been pushing a lot.

There’s not much in the way of new footage in the featurette, but Bell and co-stars Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Miles Teller talk a bit about what makes Fantastic Four different from its predecessors, and maybe even other superhero films. Mara thinks their more human and grounded qualities (something we heard a lot at Comic-Con) will help audiences connect with the film, while the rest of the cast talks about teamwork and gives us a little more of the team’s back story: they were all chosen to attend a prestigious magnet school for gifted young people, and that’s where they cracked the inter-dimensional time travel thing.

“Fantastic Four,” a contemporary re-imagining of Marvel’s original and longest-running superhero team, centers on four young outsiders who teleport to an alternate and dangerous universe, which alters their physical form in shocking ways. Their lives irrevocably upended, the team must learn to harness their daunting new abilities and work together to save Earth from a former friend turned enemy.

Fantastic Four also stars Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey and Tim Blake Nelson, and hits theaters on August 7.