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O nce upon a time, every new superhero movie seemed to exist in (not-so) splendid isolation. Michael Keaton's Batman never ♠ met Christopher Reeve's Superman, despite the cities of Gotham and Metropolis being situated less than 300 miles apart in many ♠ DC comic book tales. When Sony's Spider-Man found himself under threat from the likes of the Green Goblin, Doc Ock ♠ and even a nefarious Symbiote in the early to mid-noughties Tobey Maguire films, he did not dial up Iron Man ♠ or send an email into space for the attention of one Thor Odinson of Asgard – because those characters were ♠ inconveniently owned by someone else. Only in the comics was Ant-Man likely to bump into the Hulk, or Mister Fantastic ♠ make the acquaintance of Captain America.

It was Marvel Studios, beginning with 2012's The Avengers, that popularised a brave new world ♠ of interconnected superheroes who, in many ways, broke all the rules of superhero film-making. Suddenly, heroes and villains were capable ♠ of extended, multiple episode character arcs that added a richness and realism to proceedings that had rarely been seen before. ♠ Iron Man might just have invented time travel, but on a psychoanalytic level he felt like a real person capable ♠ of genuine human emotions, soaring success, abject failure ... ahem, casual sexism ... and everything in between. Each new superhero ♠ to emerge fully formed into the Marvel multiverse felt intelligently connected to all the others, ripples in the fabric of ♠ reality in one corner of the multiversal web somehow affecting matters somewhere else entirely in unexpected ways (at least until ♠ the more recent, weaker films).

All of which might leave us wondering exactly why Marvel supremo Kevin Feige has just revealed ♠ that the new Fantastic Four film, in which Reed Richards, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing are ♠ about to debut for Marvel movies, will take place (at least initially) somewhere that does not seem to be in ♠ the MCU at all. Speaking on the latest episode of the Official Marvel Podcast, Feige confirmed suggestions that the film ♠ will be set in the 1960s, but hinted heavily that this will be a very different version of 20th-century. terrestrial ♠ reality to any we've yet seen.

"It is a period film," said ♠ Feige. "There was another piece of art we released with Johnny Storm flying in the air, making the 4 symbol ♠ and there was a cityscape in the corner of the image. And there were a lot of smart people who ♠ noticed that the cityscape doesn't look exactly like the New York that we know or the New York that existed ♠ in the '60s in our world. Those were smart observations."

This is nothing new for Marvel, in a sense. The advent ♠ of alternate realities in episodes such as Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, not ♠ to mention the TV series Loki, means we're used to seeing our heroes jumping from one universe to the next. ♠ Moreover, the absence of the Fantastic Four from the MCU would explain why nobody has ever mentioned them up until ♠ now. And yet if Feige really is hinting that the team will begin their journey in a different universe to ♠ the Earth 616 we've become used to, and which so closely resembles our own without the superheroes, this is still ♠ something new and different.

Rather than starting out in our own world, these are superheroes from another universe who are (presumably) ♠ likely at some stage to make the time and reality jump so that they interact with the characters we already ♠ know. That is after all, kind of the point of Marvel on the big screen, even to the extent that ♠ we now have superheroes who once existed in entirely different film series – Spider-Man and his various enemies in No ♠ Way Home; Deadpool and Wolverine in the forthcoming Shawn Levy film – happily fistbumping the MCU crew.

Of course, Marvel might ♠ just do something truly original here and keep the awesome foursome trapped in their own world, despite the fact that ♠ they have every means of bringing them into the big, multiversal picture. Who wouldn't want to explore a super-stylised, fantasy ♠ take on the 1960s where everything is slightly different from our own world, in appealingly far-out and intriguing ways? Maybe ♠ the Beatles are all Martians – who knows how weird this stuff could get? But wouldn't that, in a sense, ♠ be cheating, given how Marvel has spent all its time and effort since 2008's Iron Man convincing us that everything ♠ is connected, to the extent that every other studio making superhero movies has become too embarrassed to do anything but ♠ mimic its more successful rival?

The short odds are on the Fantastic Four making the leap pretty quickly. It might not ♠ happen in the space of a single movie but, when it does, the results could be seismic – or at ♠ least amusing. For if advance publicity really does offer a realistic look at the groovy retro world where the quartet ♠ begin their journey, this is going to be the nuttiest fish-out-of-water tale since Arnold Schwarzenegger went chariot racing and fought ♠ a bear in Central Park in 1970's Hercules in New York.