Fantastic Four Red Ghost Theory Makes Perfect Sense for the Marvel Movie

The first trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps brims with 1960s Marvel goodness. We’ve got the Marvel-1, we’ve got H.E.R.B.I.E. with a reel-to-reel for a face, we’ve got Baxter Building in all of its glory.

However, we don’t have much of another defining aspect of 1960s Marvel: Cold War politics. Unless, of course, the mystery villain played by John Malkovich is not the Puppet Master, as was initially rumored, but rather Ivan Kragoff, aka the Red Ghost.

If Malkovich is indeed the Red Ghost, then First Steps is embracing the ’60s even more than we previously thought. The character also makes a lot of sense for this take on Marvel’s First Family.

Red Ghost Is the Wacky B-Villain the Fantastic Four Needs

“Who is He? What is He?” asks the cover to 1962’s Fantastic Four #13, an early chapter in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby‘s defining run on the series. The issue doesn’t answer that question right away, and instead opens with Reed Richards nearly destroying his lab with an amazing discovery: a substance that would allow them send a rocket to the moon, thus winning the space race.

While Ben and Reed argue about Mr. Fantastic attempting a solo mission instead of putting everyone at risk, we cut to Russia where scientist Ivan Kragoff prepares his team for a Soviet moon mission, except it’s a trio of trained apes. The apes allow Kragoff to launch his expedition at the same time as the FF. Like the already-irradiated foursome, Kragoff and his apes get exposed to cosmic rays and gain powers, including shape-shifting and super-strength. Because of his newfound power to become intangible, Kragoff takes the codename Red Ghost.

Fantastic Four #13 perfectly encapsulates the tone of 1960s Marvel Comics. Like the comics published by DC, they took a goofy sci-fi tone, working as many monkeys as possible into stories about rockets and lasers. In other words, pulling Kragoff off the page and into First Steps is a way for Marvel to tap into the team’s wacky early adventures, just as things are also about to get cosmic with Galactus and the Silver Surfer.

Through Kragoff, Marvel can also explore another key part of the Fantastic Four’s early days. You see, while Superman and Green Lantern largely stayed out of politics, 1960s Marvel stories traded on the Cold War. Soviets sent Natasha Romanoff aka the Black Widow to steal Tony Stark’s secrets. The Russians created their own Hulk out of Emil Blonsky, aka the Abomination. They created their own Captain America with the Red Guardian to battle the Avengers.

In short, Lee may have sided with the hippies during his college campus visits, but he sure hated Commies in the pages of Marvel Comics.

Red Ghost Is a Necessary Part of the 1960s Setting

Although Black Widow, the Abomination, and Red Guardian have all appeared in the MCU, the modern setting means that Marvel doesn’t have to deal with the characters’ original politics. The MCU Abomination is English, just like actor Tim Roth. David Harbour plays Red Guardian as a lovable buffoon whose pride in Mother Russia is cartoonish instead of scary. Even Natasha aligns herself more in opposition to the Red Room than to Russia, as indicated by the accent that Scarlett Johansson avoids and that Florence Pugh, as her sister Yelena Belova, adopts. None of these characters feel like they came from the cold war. Which makes sense, given that Iron Man premiered almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But First Steps can’t ignore that tension, at least not if the movie wants to harness some the ’60s optimism of the original Stan and Jack comics.

Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Bruce Banner, and other first wave Marvel heroes were free market capitalists and individualists, whose ingenuity and hard work allowed them to create inventions that would prove the superiority of the West. Sure, there was some tragedy in there, as when Bruce risked his life to save a dumb teenager hanging around a gamma bomb test site and became the Hulk. But even Bruce’s bravery was framed as something the Soviets lacked. These comics believed that America would inevitably defeat the USSR, and that faith motivated their high-flying imagination.

Red Ghost was one of the villains who provided a counter-point. Ugly and old, the Red Ghost represented everything retrograde, as did his decision to rely not on inventions but on apes, an evolutionary step backwards. The Red Ghost may cause trouble for the FF, but it’s their boundless faith in the Good Ol’ U.S. of A. that charges every wisecrack the Thing makes at Ivan’s expense.

Red Ghost Gets a Good Laugh

Given that Marvel worked hard to even call Nazis bad, separating Red Skull and Hydra from Hitler, it’s hard to believe that First Steps will lean so directly into a political message, even one as conservative as the anti-Communist rhetoric of the era.

Still, it’s impossible to separate the FF’s sense of achievement and their wild celebrity status from their ability to win the Space Race for America. Even if First Steps doesn’t want to foreground that tension, having a character like Red Ghost around will allow the movie to recognize the Cold War politics indirectly. And as long as we’re laughing at his goofy set of super apes, we probably won’t notice the political perspective the movie takes, at least not enough to champion it or get mad about it.

After all, who can get mad at First Steps when we’re watching rockets, robots, super-monkeys, and other fantastic sights?

Fantastic Four: First Steps zooms into theaters on July 25, 2025.

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