Marvel Studios is going to great lengths to keep Eternals under wraps, and there's no doubt a very good reason for that. It certainly feels like Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao is going to take the Marvel Cinematic Universe to some unexpected places, but as these heroes have been on Earth for thousands of years now, we need some answers about why they were absent for the entire Infinity Saga.
Talking to Total Film, Zhao doubled down on what we learned in the "final" trailer for the movie by pointing out that the Eternals are under strict instructions not to interfere in human events.
"[The audience] will understand why. Not only why, but how complicated not interfering made them feel. We explore that," the filmmaker promised. "You’ll see that in the film. The Eternals were instructed not to interfere with any human conflict unless Deviants are involved. There’s a reason why that’s the case. And that was the instruction from the prime Celestial Arishem."
Eternals is a movie that also promises to reveal much more about those Celestials, and Zhao would go on to hint that this exploration of the MCU's history is going to shed a lot more light on their mythology.
"What excited me is the idea of going back in time, and exploring [the time] before Thanos was born, before anyone was born," she says. "Where does the MCU go back in time? And that brings us to the mythology of the Celestials. Anything involving the Celestials is going to be at a huge scale level of complication, let’s put it that way.”
It's interesting that Zhao mentions Thanos here, as there has been a lot of speculation that we could see a much younger version of the Mad Titan in this movie (remember, his parents were Eternals). It all depends on how much time we spend in the past, of course, but we'd be shocked if Marvel Studios doesn't use this opportunity to take a deep dive into a few key moments in the history of the MCU.
Eternals is set to be released on November 5, later this year.