Little Caesars goes for four sets of toppings with FANTASTIC FOUR-N-ONE pizza, but who’s which slice?

Fantastic Four #1 and Little Caesars are but two years apart from their first appearances on the public sphere. Marvel’s first family debuted in 1961. The house of “Pizza, Pizza” opened its doors in 1959. It has taken decades, but the need for merchandise and promotional partnerships have finally brought these two giants together. Starting with a soft launch on June 16^th, Little Caesars will be offering the Fantastic Four-N-One pizza in anticipation of the July 25^th release of Fantastic Four: First Steps on movie theaters nationwide.

The Fantastic Four-N-One is a limited time offer that, for $7.99, will net fans a large pie made up of four pairs of slices each with their own ingredients: cheese, pepperoni, Italian sausage and bacon, and pepperoni and jalapeño. Each set clearly represents one of the four heroes in the team. More on this in a minute.

This partnership has also resulted in Little Caesars‘s first ever exclusive film-inspired pizza boxes. Collect all four to create a full team image. In addition, customers who spend at least $20 in one order (either in-restaurant or online, excluding third party delivery services) receive a code on their receipts for $4 off a Fantastic Four: First Steps movie ticket. Families of four, make four separate orders to get a collective $16 off (or less than a single movie ticket in this economy).

Excited by this news, I ordered the Fantastic Four-N-One pizza (which had Reed Richards on the box) and was happy with what I got. The four ingredients gimmick was fun and the pizza was great. If you’re a fan of Little Caesar, then you know what you’re getting. What we didn’t expect from this experience was the furious debate that it would spark as to which pair of slices belonged to which FF member.

First off, Little Caesars missed a trick by not leaving two empty spots, or ‘invisible’ slices, on the pie. The opportunity was right there. Customer calls in to complain about how the pizza’s missing a whole section? All Little Caesars had to do was say “oh, they’re there. You just can’t see them. You’re welcome.”

The absence of invisible pizza left the door wide open for conflict. While it was obvious that jalapeño and pepperoni represented Johnny Storm, and that Italian sausage and bacon belonged to Yancy Street’s own Ben Grimm (The Thing), questions were raised as to which slices were meant for Reed Richards and Sue Storm.

Initially, it was argued that Sue was cheese because it didn’t have any toppings. Perhaps in corporate philosophy, cheese is invisible pizza. This left Reed as pepperoni, perhaps as an attempt to rope in the Elastic Man’s extensive experience in molecule research (pepperoni = subatomic particles). But the argument could’ve been made in the opposite direction as well. Cheese is supposed to be stretchy on its own (something Little Caesars’s cheese pizza isn’t), meaning that eating one of those slices is the same as munching on Reed himself. On Sue’s side, fans could argue that her force field powers hold the shape and structure of pepperoni (i.e. circles). That said, pepperoni is one of the most popular pizza toppings in the history of food, making it the most ‘visible’ option on the menu. This might go against the core tenets of the character, thus taking the discussion back to square one.

We didn’t reach a final conclusion. Questions remained as to the nature of Reed and Sue’s powers and how pepperoni could either accept or resist the association with either of them. Regardless, the pie was consumed in its entirety, perhaps hinting at Little Caesars ultimate goal: turn each one of us into Galactus come dinner time. As an extension, delivery people become Silver Surfer, the herald of hunger. Is this me taking things too far, overthinking it? Yes. Did it leave me more confused with life and its conundrums than I already was before the pizza arrived? Also yes. The only objective truth in this debacle was that pizza was had. The rest remains a mystery.

Notice the circles on both images.

Comics have been good to Little Caesars. Back in 2022, they released the infamous The Batman Calzony in anticipation of Matt Reeves’s The Batman film. The Beat’s very own Joe Grunenwald took on that behemoth and lived to tell about it. This time around, the controversy will surround the identity of cheese and pepperoni in the grand scheme of things. So, eat and discuss. Do not avoid the conversation. Face it, and then consume the pie. Become Galactus, as the pizza chain intended.