One of the primary selling points of the “Thanos is protecting everyone from Galactus” fan theory is the way he goes about wiping out half of life in the universe. As Redditor jlfrench points out, if Thanos was truly trying to restore balance and prevent famine, he wouldn’t have killed off half of all livestock. Destabilizing food chains isn’t helpful in restoring planetary peace.
The other less dramatic solution Thanos could have taken was doubling food supplies across the universe, and the Galactus theory has an obvious answer for that, too. “This also explains why Thanos doesn’t just double the resources because this would actually just draw in Galactus even faster.”
The next step for the MCU’s antagonistic roll call is unclear since the studio dropped Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror at the end of 2023. While there are plenty of potential villain replacements, the impending Fantastic Four film makes Galactus (who is a major villain for that franchise, in particular) a juicy prospect. Linking their debut to the Thanos timeline could make the connection even better.
The Reddit theory even offered a clean way to link the two, and it comes through the ever-involved Dr. Stephen Strange. “One other way this could impact the story is Dr. Strange’s 14million future LSD trip,” Redditor jlfrench explains. “Maybe the reason it was so hard to ‘win’ was because that would include beating Galactus AND not killing half the universe.” Perhaps stopping Thanos was just the beginning of the one-in-14-million success story version of events. Maybe that epic storyline won’t conclude until our intrepid cinematic Marvel heroes take down Galactus in this timeline, too.
