We are just days away from The Fantastic Four: First Steps and the hype is electric. With the final trailer and new clips out, Matt Shakman has been doing the promotional rounds. In a recent interview he dropped a major bombshell about the film’s main villain: Galactus.
For comic book fans, Galactus is the Devourer of Worlds—a cosmic entity whose hunger drives him to consume entire planets to maintain his power. He’s often depicted as an elemental force, beyond good and evil, driven by an insatiable cosmic appetite. In the interview Matt Shakman said The Fantastic Four: First Steps will explore the complexities of Galactus’s motivations and it’s not just about hunger.
Shakman and Ralph Ineson (who voices Galactus) want to make Galactus not just a villain but an incredibly powerful being detached from the problems of mortal life. Ineson said he wants to give Galactus’s voice the sound of a “church organ” using breath and air to make sound like a tsunami, landslide or hurricane. He wants to convey strength without arrogance or malice. He’s just himself.
But the real reveal came in a recent video and subsequent comments from Shakman. It turns out Galactus isn’t just choosing Earth at random. There’s a much more sinister reason for his presence. The film suggests Galactus’s true target on Earth is none other than the unborn child of Reed and Sue Richards: Franklin Richards.
This is a new twist for comic book fans. In the comics Franklin Richards is a powerhouse, a reality warper who at one point even makes Galactus his herald. The idea that his powers are so strong even in infancy that they attract the attention of the most powerful beings in the universe is genius and gives Galactus a motivation beyond just hunger.
“What makes this movie work is the smallest, youngest thing in existence alongside the biggest, oldest force in the universe,” Shakman said. The contrast between Franklin’s fragility and potential and Galactus’s timelessness and omnipotence is great. For the Fantastic Four, it makes the conflict very personal. Their fight isn’t to save a planet, it’s to save their family, especially their child, from an existential cosmic threat.
By showing Galactus’s motivations in this way, the movie gets a lot of complexity and emotional punch. This means the Fantastic Four are trying to outsmart a celestial being whose plan has a deep impact on their greatest fears and hopes rather than just a force of nature.
It looks like The Fantastic Four: First Steps is going to deliver the cosmic spectacle we’d expect from Galactus’s presence and add a lot of emotional complexity because of his real motivations. Beyond survival, this is the core of sacrifice, the instinct to protect and the incredible power of family bonds in the face of impossible odds.
