In the opening scene of Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four: First Steps, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) discovers that she’s pregnant and breaks the news to her husband and fellow superhero team member Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal). Reed freaks out about normal parent stuff, like babyproofing their retro-futuristic home/headquarters, the Baxter Building. But he’s also worried about the possibility that the cosmic rays that gave him and Sue superpowers might cause abnormalities in the kid.
Although Reed causes some family friction by spending more time developing scanning technology for prenatal inspections than on building nursery furniture, he’s right to be worried. Franklin is a very special baby with a long history in Marvel Comics, and his birth has big implications for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Like the rest of the Fantastic Four, Franklin Richards was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the ’60s. But while his parents have fairly standard powers — stretching for Reed, invisibility plus forcefields for Sue — Franklin is a mutant with the ability to warp reality itself. He is one of the most powerful beings in all of Marvel Comics, topping even the Omega Level mutant power classification given to Jean Grey and Magneto. His power is viewed as equivalent to the Celestials that appeared in Eternals and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
While most mutants don’t manifest their powers until they hit puberty, the comics version of Franklin starts demonstrating his abilities when he’s still a toddler. In a 1973 Fantastic Four arc by Gerry Conway, Annihilus — a Fantastic Four villain from the antimatter universe the Negative Zone — kidnaps baby Franklin and uses a machine to unleash his full potential. Franklin’s abilities prove way too much for a child to control, and Reed has to place him in a coma. The kid wakes up 10 issues later to battle Ultron, which makes his powers settle back down.
Photo: 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios
In a 1982 arc by John Byrne, Franklin gets frustrated trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube and uses his powers to age himself into an adult body, though he couldn’t actually gain more emotional maturity. He winds up going back to being a kid, placing restrictions on his own abilities to allow him to have something of a normal childhood.
[Ed. note: This section contains light spoilers for Fantastic Four: First Steps.]
Annihilus isn’t the only villain who’s kidnapped Franklin. The super-child has also been abducted by his time-traveling grandfather and the psychic entity Onslaught. In Fantastic Four: First Steps, it’s Galactus who wants to steal the baby.
Galactus and Franklin share a deep connection in the comics. Franklin actually became the planet-eating cosmic entity in Jim Krueger and John Paul Leon’s 1999 alternate universe Earth X series. In Jonathan Hickman’s 2012 run of Fantastic Four, Franklin resurrects Galactus so that he can fight a group of Celestials, who are trying to conquer the multiverse using the same Bridge technology Reed experiments with in the film. In Fantastic Four: First Steps, Galactus sees Franklin as a possible successor who can absorb Galactus’ never-ending hunger and take over the role of eating planets.
Galactus’ reasoning is that Franklin also possesses the Power Cosmic, a source of unlimited power that Galactus and the Silver Surfer wield. While the MCU has lightly broached the idea that its setting might include mutants (and outright dropped them into other multiverse settings), it seems like Marvel is going for a different explanation for Franklin’s power. That could also explain the baby’s biggest moment in the movie.
Photo: Marvel Studios/20th Century Studios
[Ed. note: This section contains major spoilers for Fantastic Four: First Steps, including its ending and mid-credits scene.]
In order to save their world, Earth-828, Reed and Sue use their own child as bait for Galactus, luring him into a trap that teleports him somewhere far away. Sue uses an immense amount of power to push Galactus into position, then seemingly dies of exhaustion. But while everyone is mourning the Invisible Woman, Franklin reaches out for his mom and glows for a bit, and Sue comes back to life.
There is a group of mutants in Marvel Comics with the power to revive the dead, but Franklin isn’t one of them. His powers mostly manifest as telepathy, precognition, and energy blasts. His ability to resurrect his mom is probably due to the fact that she died from draining all of the power she gained from exposure to cosmic rays, which are effectively a weaker form of the Power Cosmic. Franklin was probably able to give her a recharge, like using an electric shock to restart a stopped heart, but it’s unlikely he’d be able to revive someone who didn’t die in similar circumstances.
The Fantastic Four’s questionable decision to publicly reveal that Galactus wanted their baby probably made Doctor Doom pretty curious about what makes the kid so special. It’s unclear what he actually wants from Franklin – maybe to have his face healed, given that he’s taking off his mask in front of the kid? But we’ll presumably have to wait until Avengers: Doomsday to find out.
