Fantastic Four: The Terrifying Reed Richards Line That Could Affect Avengers: Secret Wars

This article contains The Fantastic Four: First Steps spoilers.

Late in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a quiet moment between father and son takes a brief and despairing, turn. Ever since the world-devourer Galactus expressed interest in the boy, Reed had been monitoring Franklin for signs of powers, not unlike the irradiated abilities he shares with his son’s mother Sue. In frustration, Reed finally turns off the equipment and simply holds the baby.

“I don’t want you to be like me,” he confesses. “There’s something wrong with me.”

To viewers, that’s a weird statement. Sure, Reed blames himself for the accident that led to the team’s exposure to cosmic rays. But time and again, his teammates—including the mutated Ben Grimm, aka the Thing—assured him that they do not hold him responsible. Moreover the guy calls himself Mr. Fantastic. So what’s wrong with him? For the answer to that question, we’ll have to turn to the pages of Marvel Comics, which show us just how unique the Reed Richards we know and love is.

Multiversal Problems

“There’s no problem that can’t be solved.” Reed Richards says those words at the end of 2009’s Dark Reign: Fantastic Four #1, illustrated by Sean Chen and written by Jonathan Hickman, the writer who would go on to create one of the most important runs in the characters’ history. In Dark Reign, Reed explores that hypothesis by building the Bridge, a machine that allows him to visit anywhere on the Earth and in any universe.

But by the end of Fantastic Four #570, Hickman’s first issue on the main series, Reed realizes he needs help if he wants to solve everything. And so he uses the Bridge to contact the only person smart enough to help Reed Richards: Reed Richards. Well, Reed Richardses, to be exact. The Reed of Earth-616 (the designation used for the mainline Earth in Marvel Comics and the MCU, confusingly) seeks help from the Interdimensional Council of Reeds, a collection of Mr. Fantastics from across the multiverse.

At first the Reeds seem like a godsend. Together they deal with not only the issues vexing the Reed of 616, but also the issues facing other worlds. Within hours they’ve stopped Galactus and incapacitated Doctor Doom. Yet Reed 616 cannot help but notice something cold and unfeeling about his counterparts, a willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of solving problems.

And that’s when it hits him: all the rest of the Reeds left their families behind in pursuit of their goals. As a result, they lost their connection to humanity. Yes, they could create utopias. But they made unfeeling and inhumane utopias, not unlike the better world imagined by his arch-nemesis, Victor Von Doom.

The Council of Interdimensional Reeds is just one of many examples of Reed going mad without his family, a reminder that the Fantastic Four are always better together. But Hickman’s story didn’t include the most infamous example of that truism, a character who has become one of the major Marvel villains.

Ultimate Evil

At first the Reed Richards of Earth-1610 seemed like an exception to the evil alternate rule. Which made sense, because Earth-1610 was the home of the Ultimate Universe.

Launched in 2000, the Ultimate Marvel line restarted their classic characters fresh and in the present, hoping to offer an easy and continuity-free jumping on point. The Ultimate Universe gave us Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s excellent 111-issue run on Ultimate Spider-Man, a series that would eventually introduce Miles Morales (albeit with Sara Pichelli on art instead of Bagley). It also gave us the extremely popular and extremely dated series, The Ultimates, in which the Avengers were Bush-era neoconservatives.

Initially Ultimate Fantastic Four, written by Mark Millar and featuring art credited to Greg Land, followed the standard model. Elements of the team dynamic were updated for modern day, including making Reed and Sue equals in scientific acumen and in age (which is better than the original version, in which Reed met Sue when he was a young adult and she a young girl). But their stories mostly followed the usual Fantastic Four model, presenting the quartet a family of explorers.

That is until the Ultimatum. For the uninitiated, Ultimatum is a famously terrible 2009 series written by Jeph Loeb and penciled by David Finch. Imagined as something of a relaunch for the Ultimate Universe, which had become just as tangled in continuity as its mainline counterpart, Ultimatum involves Magneto creating a host of natural disasters by reversing the Earth’s polarity. By the end of the story, many characters had died—including the Wasp, Wolverine, Magneto, and Doctor Strange—and Reed and Sue broke up.

That last point doesn’t seem as important, but the breakup drives Reed from the rest of the team, especially when Sue and Ben become lovers. To deal with the breakup, Reed throws himself into his work and indulges his worse instinct. Reed eventually takes on a new identity, calling himself the Maker, and threatens the Ultimate Universe time and again. But the Maker becomes particularly dangerous in a story that saw the end of the Ultimate Universe, a story that is important to fans of the MCU: Secret Wars.

Secret and Sinister

In the mid-credit scene of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, set four years after the events of the film, Sue walks into a room to see her worst nightmare come to life. There holding the hand of her son Franklin, is the team’s arch-nemesis Doctor Doom. Before she can act (and before we can get a sense of Robert Downey Jr.‘s take on Doom), the screen cuts to black and a title card reads, “The Fantastic Four will return in Avengers: Doomsday.”

Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars are poised to be the next great entries in the MCU, hoping to reshape the universe like Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame did years ago. While the specifics will certainly be different, the two movies will likely follow the same basic plot as the comic book story Secret Wars from 2015.

Written by Hickman and illustrated by Esad Ribić, Secret Wars is the culmination of the grand epic that the latter began with Fantastic Four and continued with Avengers and New Avengers. In it Doctor Doom saves the Earth from multiversal collapse by stealing the power of godlike figures the Beyonders and recreating the Earth in his image. Only a small band of survivors stand to oppose the now God Emperor Doom, including the Reeds of 616 and 1610, who form an uneasy alliance to take down Doom.

Of course the Maker betrays Reed and tries to take Doom’s place, leading to his temporary death. But like any good villain, the Maker returned time and again over the past decade, establishing himself as one of Marvel’s best new villains. In fact, the Maker is currently at the center of the current Ultimate Marvel storyline (spearheaded by, you guessed it, Jonathan Hickman), in which he has created a new universe according to his desires, all part of his own goal of solving every problem.

Making Trouble for the Avengers

What does this all this mean for the MCU? As seen in the post-credits of Thunderbolts*, the Fantastic Four will make their way from Earth-828 to Earth-616, possibly to retrieve Franklin from Doctor Doom. And as we know from the movie’s casting announcement, the Fox X-Men will appear in Doomsday, probably just long enough for their world to end in an incursion.

Given the amount of characters and plot Doomsday and Secret Wars will need to cover, a heel-turn from 828’s Reed seems unlikely. That leaves room for a 616 Reed to be a bad guy, but it’s hard to imagine that someone of his intelligence hiding in the MCU without anyone noticing. But this is a multiverse story, which means that we could see a bad guy version of Reed from another reality. Could it be a return for Ioan Gruffudd, who did appear on the red carpet for the premiere of First Steps? What about the Maker played by Miles Teller, who played a darker Reed Richards in the 2015 movie, which drew inspiration from the Ultimate Fantastic Four series?

Whatever the plot will be, there’s no denying that Reed has potential to go very wrong, which could make for some fantastic stories for us MCU fans.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now playing in theaters.