There are three surefire topics for every discussion about Marvel’s upcoming film. Robert Downey Jr. in a green cloak. The accent, the voice, and if people will allow the man who made the entire franchise happen to burn it down. All this is irrelevant noise. Avengers: Doomsday is all about the smallest of characters with less dialogue than The Thing has fists and if Marvel fails with him, the whole second act of the story crashes and burns.
This fact wasn’t missed by Marvel themselves, but everyone ignored it. Remember how The Fantastic Four: First Steps ends. Sue Storm dying defending Earth from a god, a baby saving her, and the movie brilliantly leaving that fact unexplained. Then, credits, years pass on screen, and the guy in green cloak comes in baby’s room. No studio uses its most precious thirty seconds of teaser space to introduce something irrelevant. That isn’t a teaser, that’s a thesis statement.
Of course, it only makes sense after understanding the nature of what Victor von Doom lacks. He’s not deficient in power. He’s lacking in one particular aspect of it. Doom has intellect, technology, magic, his country, and an ego that can pull itself to the ground through sheer gravity of its presence. What he never had in sixty years of comic books is the power of making the entire universe from scratch.
It’s proven by Doom’s greatest achievement. During the 2015 Secret Wars, Doom does something impossible for other villains: he becomes a God Emperor, he merges the destroyed realities into Battleworld, and rules them for eight years while rewritting people’s memories so that they all think he was a God all along. It’s the biggest victory of any Marvel villain, and he accomplishes that feat with borrowed powers. Doom siphons the Beyonders’ power with the help of Molecule Man and hides his power source in a secret chamber beneath his castle’s gardens, like hiding a charger somewhere. The moment that source leaves him, Doom is stripped of his divinity in a page and a half, and he’s reduced to a guy with a mask in fistfight again. Doom is a genius constructor who can’t create a single brick himself and always misplaces the generator in the end.
Which is why nursery scene is important. The Galactus, who ate entire planets since eternity, wanted the Richards baby not as a snack but as a successor. He recognized the Power Cosmic in the baby and offered to stop his eternal hunger with it. Then, that same baby saved his mother from death. Put together, it’s clear that during one film, Marvel introduced a character who surpasses all their universe-destroying threats, using a child who can’t make a sentence yet.
And the comics have been doing this for decades. Franklin created universes to bring back dead superheroes and saved his sister before her birth through time travel. After Battleworld was destroyed, Franklin envisioned new realities while his father gave them structure, and it burned all his powers. Then, Marvel decided that Franklin was never a mutant and Charles Xavier confirmed this, causing the fandom meltdown, and changing nothing – regardless of the label, the function remains. Franklin Richards is a creation engine with a child’s face.
Of course, calling him a mere battery misses the darker side of him, because Franklin is also Reed’s son. The Richards family is the thing that pushes Doom’s mind crazy. He delivered Valeria Richards personally when Reed couldn’t do it, took naming rights as payment, and picked a girl he loved before an accident destroyed his face. He’s been a part of that child’s life ever since. And when Doom was offered unlimited power and possibility of building any reality he wants, what does he build? He builds Sue Storm as his wife, raises Franklin and Valeria as his children, and erases Reed from everyone’s memories. Given unlimited power, Doom creates the Richards family.
Taking Franklin, therefore, is not just a tactical move. It’s the very point. Reed spends his life protecting his family from the smartest man alive, and then witnesses his son becoming a tool for Doom’s world-building. There’s nothing like total defeat here, and there’s no version of this character who would accept anything else.
All of this is reinforced by the footage more than people realize. Doom’s opening narration isn’t a threat but a warning about something unstoppable and an “unthinkable” decision that he has to make. This is someone who already counted the costs and didn’t like the results. The editing is even more obvious: Doom talking about stealing lives clashes against parent-child relationships, including that of Scott Lang and Cassie, Thor and his daughter, Steve Rogers and his kid, and even Johnny Storm saying farewell to Franklin. Plus, the rumors about Doom saying that Franklin resembles his son are circulating among the leak crowd. Consider them rumors, but they fit the Doom who’s grieving rather than gloating, and that would explain why the man came into nursery and not lab.
None of it guarantees safety. Powerful and young characters are one bad draft away from being carried from set piece to set piece until he does the big thing and the credits roll. Even worse, a child who can bring back from death means a solution to all problems. If Franklin can fix anything, nothing has a price anymore, and Secret Wars turns into a reset button, silently erasing nine years of storytelling as if they never happened. Luckily, comics solved this problem long ago: make the power costly, make Franklin pay the price of everything he does, and make the adults bear the burden of decision. Watch a child burning himself out so that the adults can have their world back, and you get an ending instead of an undo button.
Doom will get the poster, and he deserves it. He’s the best villain in comics and Downey will play him perfectly. But the villain isn’t the engine. Doom is the goal, Franklin is the power, and without that boy the film is just a man in armor yelling to a room full of heroes who beat him every time. MCU has been looking for the central axis of their world since Tony Stark snapped his fingers. Guess what? It’s a little boy in a nursery in some other universe, and we’ll see what it really is on December 18, 2026.
