Michael Giacchino Breaks Down His Stellar Score for ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

If you can’t get the Fantastic Four: First Steps soundtrack out of your head, blame Michael Giacchino.

The award-winning composer is no stranger to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, writing fan-favorite scores for films like Doctor Strange and Spider-Man: Homecoming. (He also directed and scored the beloved 2022 special Werewolf by Night.) But with the newly released The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Giacchino delivers some of his most memorable melodies to date — a soaring, optimistic soundscape that helps breathe life into Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm.

“Honestly with most Marvel movies — and I’ve worked on a lot of them — there’s a lot of angst and not a lot of joy,” Giacchino tells Marvel.com with a laugh. “So, when you get to do something like this, it feels unique and special.”

Early in the production process, Fantastic Four director Matt Shakman recruited Giacchino to write the film’s music, and the composer threw himself into the assignment with gusto. The story takes place in a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, and Shakman wanted that same feeling of space-age optimism to extend to the soundtrack.

“The movie that Matt has put together is so unlike any of the other Marvel films that we’ve seen, which is really wonderful,” Giacchino adds. “I feel like it gives us some leeway to make some choices that we might not normally make on any of the other characters’ films.”

One of those unique choices? Embracing vocals. Early on, Giacchino decided to record the Fantastic Four theme with a full choir, assembling a chorus of more than 100 voices at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios. He notes that many film composers tend to use a choir when they want to evoke a dramatic or gothic mood. But for The Fantastic Four, Giacchino wanted his singers to sound brighter and full of wondrous hope.

The composer also admits that he was initially nervous about pitching the vocal-heavy theme to Shakman and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, wondering, “Is it weird to do this?” But the first time they heard the chorus sing the words “Fan-tas-tic FOUR!” in perfect harmony, he and the filmmakers knew they had struck a chord.

“A hundred people in a choir is something you normally don’t do,” Giacchino adds. “They said they can’t even remember the last time they recorded a hundred-person choir at Abbey Road, so that was really fun. But there’s a power to actual human beings giving their voice to something. You can’t get that any other way. For me, this film is all about the human aspect of these characters, so I wanted the music to support that.”  

Giacchino also points out how the First Steps theme kicks off with a chorus of female voices, setting the tone for the melody to come. “For me, that was sort of like the beating heart behind Sue,” he explains. “Sue in some ways is the one leading the charge in this film, and I really liked that.”  

In an unusual move, Giacchino wrote and completed the Fantastic Four theme long before the movie was finished. While writing, he found himself thinking a lot about the 1983 astronaut classic The Right Stuff, as well as the joyous sounds of Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade.

“I remember seeing that as a kid and just being amazed by all the lights, rhythms, and synthesizer sounds,” he recalls. “It felt so futuristic and hopeful and optimistic. I was like, ‘Wow, if we can grab some of that feeling and mash it up with The Right Stuff, maybe we’ll have our theme.’”

Giacchino also famously wrote another iconic score about a retro-futuristic family of Super Heroes: Pixar’s 2004 classic The Incredibles. But while the two films share some similarities, Giacchino didn’t want to revisit the same sonic territory. If The Incredibles is jazzy tones and spy movie vibes, then The Fantastic Four is all bright melodies and space-age curiosity.

“In my very first conversation with Matt, we talked about that,” Giacchino says. “I wanted to be very upfront that The Incredibles obviously owes a lot to the Fantastic Four, and now that this [movie] is being done, we wanted to separate ourselves from that as much as we possibly could. So, the idea of doing a jazz score like The Incredibles was, for me, off the table.”

The main Fantastic Four theme is a standout, but the entire soundtrack is packed with musical surprises. (Giacchino has a tradition of naming his tracks with clever wordplay and puns, and Fantastic Four boasts titles like “Herald Today, Gone Tomorrow,” “Out to Launch,” and “A Galactus Case of the Munchies.”) After the end credits, there’s a brief clip of The Fantastic Four Power Hour, a retro cartoon that reimagines Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben as the heroes of their own animated kids’ show. That was one of Giacchino’s favorite pieces to write, and he drew inspiration from the Saturday morning cartoons he loved as a kid.

“What was funny is when I first [recorded] it, it was basically just piano with me singing it, and it was terrible,” Giacchino remembers with a laugh. “That’s what they kept using in the [rough cut], and every time I’d hear it, I could not wait to get with the actual singers and do it for real.”

Another standout track plays over the end credits: “Let Us Be Devoured,” written and performed by Giacchino’s longtime collaborator Andrea Datzman. It’s a ‘60s folk-style ballad inspired by the cult of Galactus, a group of fanatics who respond to incoming global destruction with unnerving acceptance.     

“They were ready to welcome Galactus and the oblivion that was going to come,” Datzman tells Marvel.com. “We had the idea of what that song could be, and we had connected that to the sounds of the 1960s era and Joan Baez.”

“Matt wanted to get this feeling that there were different types of responses to the arrival of Galactus,” Giacchino adds. “One of those responses was a cult of people saying, ‘You know what? Maybe this is what we need. We’re okay with this!’ Andrea took on those songs and really wrote some beautiful stuff.”

Early drafts of the script featured a member of the cult singing live with a guitar, but that scene was ultimately reduced to only a brief mention. But Shakman and the crew couldn’t get Datzman’s haunting melody out of their heads. “The song sort of lived on during production,” she says. “So, they decided to put it as an Easter egg in the end-credits.”

Since debuting the Fantastic Four theme at D23: The Ultimate Disney Fan Event in August 2024, Giacchino says he has been overwhelmed by the response. Now that the full soundtrack is available to stream, he hopes that the score will live on, inspiring a new generation of Marvel fans. After all, he remembers listening to film scores over and over again as a kid, imagining what kind of stories he might one day tell.

“I’ve seen a lot of the TikTok videos of what people are doing with the theme, and that makes me verry happy,” he says with a smile. “It’s so amazing to see people having legitimate fun with this. That is the best thing I could hope for.”

Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps is in theaters now.