Fantastic Four’s trailer deserves better than this AI slop poster

The trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps starring Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby is finally out, and it looks pretty neat. Unfortunately, however, Disney decided to pair that cool Nostalgia trip to Marvel’s golden age with this poster:

Catch anything strange? Upon first glance, the poster’s only fault is the blandness permeating its every pixel. If you go all CSI on it, though, you’ll find a bigger issue. As pointed out by Wayne Talbot on Bluesky, this weak sauce poster was actually the work of what tech bros call a highly advanced AI.

Sadly, Gen AI is already decent enough at generating human fingers most of the time, but that’s been the go-to way of spotting whether an image has been generated via AI for a while. The four fingers of the person holding that flag are a dead giveaway. This means Disney not only used AI, it also couldn’t be bothered to use the best type of Gen AI — or didn’t use it very well.

Even worse, Disney might’ve tried to correct this mistake by making it dumber. Gen AI is known for creating monstrosities anywhere it goes, but it’s not used to repeating people’s faces — it usually just steals and clones the faces of two different people! So, this seems to suggest Disney used Gen AI to make the poster, then had some poor artist dig into that crap to cover up some issue by doubling a poor woman’s face.

We’ll likely never know exactly what transpired behind the scenes to cause this poster to come out the way it did, but we’re pretty sure it was stupid.

I never thought I’d say this, but I sure do miss the time when Marvel movies had posters that sucked ass in a completely normal and non-insidious way.

Well, at least the 🐲trailer still looks pretty good𝓡.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps releases on July 25.