Galactus finally made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but many viewers didn’t expect the cosmic supervillain to seem so small. Yorkshire actor Ralph Ineson, known for his iconic voice, joined the cast of The Fantastic Four: First Steps back in May 2024 as a live-action iteration of Marvel Comics’ legendary planet-eater, Galactus. A cosmic antagonist who devours entire worlds in the comics just to sustain himself, Galactus is typically depicted as an immensely large being, but this curiously wasn’t always the case in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
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By no means was the version of Galactus depicted in The Fantastic Four: First Steps actually small, but he was indeed far smaller than many had expected, and smaller than he is typically depicted in Marvel Comics. Following brief glimpses of Galactus in trailers for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the villain’s size became a point of contention for many even before the movie’s release. However, Galactus’ size actually changes and shifts throughout First Steps, allowing him to be huge in space, but still stride across the Earth, and this works perfectly for the Phase 6 movie.
Galactus’ Size-Changing Ability Makes Sense For The Fantastic Four: First Steps
For those who were expecting Galactus to literally be big enough to take a bite out of the Earth in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, it’s understandable they’d be disappointed. However, Galactus’ size and the fact that it changes throughout First Steps actually makes perfect sense for the reboot. For one, Galactus doesn’t actually want to consume the Earth in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but is instead brought to the planet in search of Franklin Richards, the newborn son of Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), who is imbued with the Power Cosmic.
Galactus is significantly larger when the Fantastic Four first meet him inside his ship in First Steps than he is when he lands on Earth 828 and strides through New York City on his hunt for Franklin Richards. The planet-eater has demonstrated the ability to change his size in Marvel Comics, too, so this was a great way to pay homage to his lengthy Marvel history. On top of all this, Galactus doesn’t actually eat worlds in the typical sense in the MCU, so he doesn’t need to be as massive as he is sometimes depicted in Marvel Comics.
In First Steps, Galactus devours worlds through a complex process that involves first driving his huge ship, Taa II, through a planet to obliterate it. After, the scattered pieces of the destroyed planets are hoovered up by the ship and processed inside, heated and reduced to molten rock which is then fed to Galactus via tubes attached his back. Galactus could have easily destroyed Earth and wouldn’t have had to grow in size to do so. His reduced size in The Fantastic Four: First Steps is not a problem — he’s still incredibly terrifying.
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