Is the desire to see F4 as a period piece a meta connection to the F4 coming ‘first’ in terms of the Marvel Age of comics? “Marvel’s First Family” as the old label goes.
But that's just why going back to their origins has never produced a good movie. What makes them work as the "First Family" is that they
aren't new, that they're a well-established presence rather than just starting out. Heck, even the debut issue of their comic started with them as an established team and only covered their origin in a brief mid-issue flashback. As with Spidey, I feel it's a mistake to constantly dwell on their beginnings rather than everything they've built since then.
Also, at the beginning, they weren't even a family, aside from Sue and Johnny. Reed and Sue weren't married yet, and they didn't have kids. I want to see the FF as they are now, an established institution and an established family with Franklin and Valeria in the picture.
if you establish the F4 (and Doom?) as contemporaries then their absence and lack of contributions for the last 25 years or so is conspicuous. Starting with the F4 in another time period and assumedly moving them forward by some event does help to provide an explanation for that.
Not really, since there was that whole 5-year time jump the movies skipped over. Say that after the Blip, when Tony withdrew into isolation, the FF moved into the void he left in the tech sphere and the superheroic sphere. Maybe they've been off exploring other dimensions during the big global crises in post-
Endgame movies. Or not. The "where were these other heroes during such-and-such?" question is perennial in superhero films, and was asked a lot about the various solo-hero films in the wake of
The Avengers. So it's hardly a dealbreaker. It's no harder to explain than why nobody's mentioned the giant stone hand that's been sticking out of the Earth since the end of
Eternals.
I think part of the association with the 60s is the trappings of the Fantastic Four. Their very name sounds like something from the 60s but also the association with space travel and exploration. Stuff like the Fantasticar and weird science though I guess the cold war dictator might be back in fashion at the moment.
I don't think its the only way to go but I can see why they would choose to go down that path.
If so, I still don't see how it possibly fits into the MCU timeline. The MCU's present day started out as a world not too dissimilar from our own in terms of its technology and knowledge of the universe. A lot of stuff been's retconned into the past since then -- the Supersoldier program, Hydra, Ant-Man, Skrulls, Eternals, etc. -- but it's all been classified or lost so that the present c. 2008 ended up looking pretty familiar. So if the FF had been around in the '60s, all the amazing inventions and discoveries they made would've had to be kept secret, and as I said, that just doesn't fit with the spirit of their stories, where everything they do is extremely public and famous. It would only make sense as an alternate timeline, and as I said, that still makes it tricky to integrate them into the main MCU going forward.
Besides, doing the FF in the '60s invites less comics-literate audiences to accuse the FF of ripping off
The Incredibles. Which is an irony I'd think Marvel/Disney would want to shy away from.
