The guessing game around Noah Jupe’s secret Avengers: Secret Wars role didn’t even need a full day to produce a frontrunner.
Within hours of the casting news breaking, fans zeroed in on Franklin Richards — Reed and Sue’s reality-warping son — and they’re backing the guess up with receipts.
A Pedro Pascal lookalike and a Letterboxd clue
The theory took off with a viral side-by-side of Jupe and Pedro Pascal that has pulled in over 200,000 views, with the poster writing, “They look like father and son so much to me.”
Hard to argue, as the curls alone do half the work.
Then came the Letterboxd find: Jupe has logged The Fantastic Four: First Steps three times, and while he’s rated plenty of MCU movies on the app, First Steps is the one he’s conspicuously left unrated.
A post flagging that detail cleared 218,000 views the same evening. Fans read it as an actor doing homework on his future screen parents, and staying quiet about the one movie he can’t talk about.
None of this is confirmed. Deadline only reported that Jupe’s role is secret and key to the story, Marvel had no comment, and the Beyonder remains the other leading fan guess.
Why Franklin Richards fits Secret Wars
The comics case is strong.
In Jonathan Hickman’s 2015 Secret Wars — the story the Russos’ two-parter is expected to pull from — God Emperor Doom doesn’t just rule Battleworld; he rules it with Sue Storm at his side and Franklin raised as his own son, while Reed is presumed dead.
If that dynamic makes the jump to the screen, the father-son resemblance stops being a coincidence and starts being casting.
Franklin matters at the other end of the story, too.
When Secret Wars wraps in the comics, it’s Franklin — a reality warper powerful enough to dream entire universes into existence — who helps Reed rebuild the multiverse.
If the MCU needs a way to put everything back together after the incursions, Franklin is the character built for exactly that job.
And Marvel has already put him at the center of Doom’s plan.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps ended with Doctor Doom coming for baby Franklin, the scene that sets up Avengers: Doomsday.
The MCU’s Franklin is a toddler right now, which is precisely why fans think the role went to a 21-year-old: between Battleworld, time jumps, and a multiverse full of variants, Secret Wars has no shortage of ways to age him up, and you don’t cast a name actor in a secret “key” role to coo in a crib.
Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026. Avengers: Secret Wars follows December 17, 2027.
