| “ | I want to do good, Mom. I do. | „ |
| ~ Brightburn |
| “ | Take the world! | „ |
| ~ Brightburn figuring out what the alien spaceship was saying to him. |
Brandon Breyer, otherwise known as Brightburn, is the titular anti-hero turned main antagonist of the 2019 supervillain horror film of the same name. In a reversal of the typical Superman story, Brandon is an extraterrestrial who is sent to Earth with the sinister intentions of taking it over. He ends up crash landing in Brightburn, Kansas, where he is adopted by a couple unable to have children.
He was portrayed by Jackson A. Dunn.
Biography
The alien baby that would become Brightburn arrived on Earth within a meteor that crash-landed near the home of a couple named Tori and Kyle Breyer in 2006. As the farm couple cannot conceive a child, they adopted the child as one of their own and named him Brandon, oblivious to the alien's dark nature. They also salvaged the remains of the meteor around that time, which turned out to be an alien ship.
As Brandon got older, he started to develop his abilities such as realizing he had superhuman strength. After attempting to return to the ship he arrived in, Brandon's mannerisms start to darken, making his adoptive parents conclude that something was wrong with him.
Tori later finds drawings that depict disturbing imagery. As he got older, Brandon developed a crush on one of his classmates named Caitlyn and he goes to her house and stalks her. Upon discovering that their chickens had been massacred and implicating Brandon as being responsible for it, Brandon began to be ostracized by his fellow classmates for being a creepy stalker. In a trust exercise, Caitlyn initially refuses to catch Brandon on the grounds of seeing him as a disturbed pervert. This culminates in him breaking her hand and he is then suspended for two days. Once more, Brandon tries to return to his spaceship and repeats the words "take the world" in his extraterrestrial language. It's implied that Brandon was sent by an imperialistic and evil alien race (his species) that destroys planets and eradicating peaceful races.
Brandon goes to see Caitlyn again only to realize that he was denied the opportunity by her mother. Angered, Brandon murders her mother at a diner. After her attempts at counseling her nephew failed, Merilee threatens to call the police to handle the situation only to be on the receiving end of these threats by Brandon. Her husband Noah later tries to inform his parents only to be gruesomely murdered in his car by the alien boy. Realizing what he had done, Kyle takes his adoptive son into the woods and shoots him in the back of the head. Unfortunately, Brandon is revealed to be immune to bullets, and he kills his adoptive father with his laser vision. Tori finds multiple drawings of the murders Brandon had committed and calls the police. When the police arrive, they are mowed down by the boy.
Tori manages to get to the spaceship, and she takes part of it to act as a shiv rationalizing that it must be her son's weakness. Embracing her son, Brandon picks up on what she attempted to do with the scrap of metal, and he takes her high into the Earth's atmosphere and drops her to her death. He also causes a plane wreck as a means of covering up his crimes. There were no survivors. This concludes with Brandon going on a murderous campaign and slaughtering numerous people worldwide and leveling cities. He was last seen along side his dead parents looking innocent.
Powers and Abilities
Brandon is an incredibly powerful alien entity, with a multitude of potent, unstoppable and extremely lethal superhuman/supernatural powers and abilities.
- Superhuman Strength: Brandon possesses immense superhuman strength, being able to lift all many of heavy objects and crush matter almost instantly with his hands.
- Superhuman Speed: Brandon can fly at superhuman speeds through the air, making him lethal and unstoppable.
- Superhuman Stamina: His adoptive father, that Brandon has never fallen ill or been injured in his entire life. This would mean his immune system is extremely advanced, rendering him immune to almost all forms of harm on earth.
- Flight: Brandon can levitate himself and fly through the air at superhuman speeds, being able to murder people violently whilst flying. He is also strong enough in flying to effortlessly fly far into the sky, well beyond the clouds.
- Heat Vision: Brandon can emit destructive heat beam that can burn through almost anything.
- Invulnerability: Brandon is immune to most physical harm, with the only thing that can harm him being the alien metal his ship made of. He discovered this through sticking his hand into the rotating blade of a lawn mower, crushing the blade in the process. When his father attempted to shoot him, the bullet only bounced off his skin.
- Enhanced Intelligence: Brandon possesses superhuman intelligence, being one of the top 1% academic performers in the country, with science and mathematics being his main areas of knowledge and expertise.
- Charisma: Brandon is a charismatic and seemingly normal, albeit precocious young boy. This is to disguise his true evil and bloodthirsty colours, although, many are not fooled by his false charms.
- Technopathy: Brandon can supernaturally affect the workings of technology, in particular lighting.
- Telekinesis: Brandon was able to tear off a pair of metal doors without using his superhuman strength, which is reasonable to assume he utilized telekinesis to perform such a feat.
Victims
- Erica Connor - Glass shard on eye and dissected
- Noah McNichol - Jaw dislocated in car accident
- Kyle Breyer - Heat vision through the head
- Sheriff Deever - Split in half
- Deputy Aryes - Continuously throw against the ceiling and walls
- Tory Breyer - Dropped from the sky
- 268 plane occupants - Killed in plane fall
Gallery
Trivia
- The concepts of Brightburn was explored in a 2017 DC comic, a Halloween special that had many short horror stories in an "else world" style - one of these stories had Superman re-imagined as an evil invader (named "Bump in the Night") - the short story even ends with the young Superman destroying the Kent farm and heading off to presumably destroy the rest of humanity, a striking similarity to how Brightburn ends (just like Brightburn the evil Superman of this story is a child (at least in appearance)).
- It is possible that Brightburn was sent by his people to conquer the Earth in the same vein as Goku from the Dragon Ball franchise. In stark contrast with Brightburn however, Goku ended up becoming mankind's protector.
- Like Damien Thorn from a franchise, The Omen, he uses supernatural powers to kill everybody.