When Galactus Looms: Is Earth’s Fate Sealed in the First Steps Trailer?

Galactus has arrived, and he’s ready to devour the world.

A new Fantastic Four: First Steps trailer debuted on Wednesday and showed the havoc wrought by the movie’s big — emphasis on big — bad.

Galactus (Ralph Ineson) has thus far only been teased in promotional materials while his shiny herald, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), got more of the focus in past trailers. And while we still don’t have a true first look at the massive space god, we see Marvel’s rebooted “First Family” — including Pedro Pascal as stretchy Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/the Human Torch, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/the Thing — do battle against him.

Watch the new trailer below:

First introduced in 1966, Galactus was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as a giant cosmic being who eats planets to survive. He previously appeared on screen in 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer as a massive, amorphous cloud in space that looked nothing like his comic book source material. Now, Ineson will portray a more comics-accurate version of the giant being in his signature purple-and-blue armor. 

“I didn’t want to just use motion-capture for Galactus,” director Matt Shakman previously told Entertainment Weekly. “I wanted to actually have someone there embodying the part, so we’ve built an entire costume for him, and we’ve done a lot of photography testing to figure out, ‘How do you make sure that the scale is correct? How do you film Mount Rushmore?'”

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is set in a retro-futuristic version of the 1960s, which is in an alternate universe from the main Marvel Cinematic Universe story. However, as the Thunderbolts* post-credits scene revealed, the foursome will eventually make their way to the main universe/timeline.

The Easter egg-filled scene featured Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), U.S. Agent/John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Bob/Sentry/Void (Lewis Pullman) pausing their discussion about “a huge space crisis” that was currently underway to watch in awe as the Fantastic Four ship raced toward their Earth in a scene that was actually filmed for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.

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“That is a scene from [Doomsday],” Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier previously told EW. “Now, things can change, as they do in the Marvel world, but as currently constituted, you were watching a small hint of that film [in that scene].”

There’s no intel (yet) on whether this scene takes place before, during, or after the events of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, so it’s unclear whether the Fantastic Four are arriving to help this Earth or escape the destruction of their own (if things don’t go well in their debut movie).

We’ll find out when The Fantastic Four: First Steps flies into theaters on July 25.