Jon Watts has publicly detailed why he exited Marvel Studios’ The Fantastic Four: First Steps, citing exhaustion from the pandemic-era shoot of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Speaking during a masterclass at Malta’s Mediterrane Film Festival, the director said he was “out of gas” after months of stringent COVID-19 safeguards and delayed visual-effects workflows and felt unable to “make that movie great” at the required scale.

He described the combined weight of safeguarding crew health and shepherding a $200 million production through supply-chain turmoil as “emotionally draining,” adding that the experience left him short of creative energy for Marvel’s first-family reboot. Industry writers note that Watts had just steered the multiversal Spider-Man finale to nearly $1.9 billion worldwide, a workload that dwarfed his previous two web-slinger entries.

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and co-president Louis D’Esposito endorsed the decision in a 2022 statement, praising Watts’ collaboration on the Spider-Man trilogy and expressing hope to reunite on future projects. Watts formally stepped away in April that year, cancelling plans to move directly into First Steps’ lengthy pre-production pipeline.

Within months, WandaVision filmmaker Matt Shakman accepted the assignment after departing Paramount’s stalled Star Trek sequel. The ensemble he is now guiding—Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach—will introduce Marvel’s First Family on 1960s-styled alternate-universe Earth when the film opens on July 25 2025, a date already shifted three times amid the studio’s wider calendar reshuffle.

Watts has instead diversified his slate. He created the Jude Law-led Star Wars series Skeleton Crew, which bowed on Disney+ last December, and wrote-directed the Apple-backed action comedy Wolfs with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, premiering at Venice in 2024. Analysts see the move as a candid example of filmmaker fatigue in a peak-tentpole climate, underscoring Marvel’s willingness to accommodate creative breaks rather than risk an overstretched production.