Will John Krasinski Play Reed Richards Past His Ill-Fated ‘Strange’ Cameo?

I’m not sure if there’s even a point in a spoiler warning at this juncture, as if you’re here, you probably googled John Krasinski or Reed Richards and are well aware of the cameo appearance in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But again, we’ll be discussing the film and his fate in it, just in case that wasn’t clear.

Ever since Marvel announced officially that the Fantastic Four would be joining the MCU sometime during this current phase, fans have had one main actor they wanted to play Reed Richards, John Krasinski, formerly Jim from The Office, but more recently, Jack Ryan for Amazon and star and director of A Quiet Place. And as an added bonus, his real-life wife, Emily Blunt, seems like a perfect Sue Storm as well.

Fan castings rarely work their way into actual productions, but that was not the case for Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. In a whole line-up of cameos, that includes Hayley Atwell as Captain Carter, Lashana Lynch as Captain Marvel, Anson Mount as Black Bolt and Patrick Stewart returning as Professor X, we also got Krasinski as Reed Richards.

That’s really the only “fan cast” in there, as all the other characters have either appeared in the MCU or FOX universes already and make sense as “alternates” for their 616 counterparts. But we have never seen Reed Richards anywhere in the MCU, and this version was not pulled from the last two times we’ve seen him onscreen in sub-par Fantastic Four films, where he was played first by Ioan Gruffudd then Miles Teller.

Krasinski is a pure fan creation, and one that fans got to watch shredded like string cheese by a rampaging Wanda. So he shows up, has a half dozen lines, and dies. But what about the future? There are a few options here.

1) This was meant as a deconstruction of fan casting by getting Krasinski in there and immediately killing him as a kind of joke. But I doubt Marvel or Raimi is that mean-spirited.

2) To me, it seems unlikely that Krasinski would have taken this “gag” role, one that he’s expressed actual interest in before, without plans for him to return as another multiverse version of Reed, either 616 Reed or another one that makes the jump to that world.

3) The multiverse rules essentially allow for either option. Multiverse of Madness showed us that usually, the same person is the same character across the multiverse. The other Wandas are Elizabeth Olsen. The other Stranges are Benedict Cumberbatch. The other Christines are Rachel McAdams. We have at last two Patrick Stewart Charles Xaviers. So it does make sense that other Reed Richards, under this system, would be John Krasinski.

4) The exception to this, of course, is what just happened in Spider-Man: No Way Home, where three different versions of Peter Parker were played by three different actors who have embodied the character in other film series. And yet if that’s what Feige and Disney wanted to do here, we probably would have gotten an Ioan Gruffudd cameo instead of Krasinski here. The only way Krasinski makes sense if it’s a somewhat mean-spirited joke on fans, or if he is legitimately going to be playing Reed Richards in the future.

I know what I’m betting on, and that’s a future where Krasinski is Mr. Fantastic in a proper film. Other ideas, like Emily Blunt playing Sue Storm or Krasinski actually directing that film, which recently lost its director, may be another matter, but I’m pretty confident that at the very least, he’ll star.

So, Chris Evans for Human Torch?

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.