Ahead of Eternals' release in 2021, there was a huge amount of excitement surrounding the movie. It had Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao at the helm, and looked set to add a new superhero team to the MCU that was even more star-studded than The Avengers.
Instead, it became Marvel Studios' first "Rotten" movie. Between that and the fact that it dropped during the final months of the pandemic, the blockbuster struggled to make its mark at the box office, grossing only $402 million worldwide.
While there's no denying it was a little overstuffed (including a terrible big bad in Kro), there was a lot about Eternals that did work. Still, four years later, Marvel Studios still hasn't announced plans to resolve the movie's cliffhanger or to even revisit these characters in any way.
Zhao has moved on to her next movie, Hamnet, which imagines the devastating love story between William and Agnes Shakespeare. Talking to Vanity Fair, she revealed how working on Eternals prepared her for the project...and what she learned from her MCU experience.
"Eternals prepared me for Hamnet because it’s world-building," the filmmaker explained. "Before that, I had only done films that existed in the real world. I also learned what to do and not to do—what’s realistic and what isn’t."
"Eternals had, like, an unlimited amount of money and resources. And here we have one street corner that we can afford, to [stand in for] Stratford," Zhao continued. "Eternals didn’t have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous. Because we only have that street corner [in Hamnet], suddenly everything has meaning."
It remains to be seen whether we'll hear more from Zhao on Eternals' failings. However, her fellow director, Nia DaCosta, recently opened up on what went wrong with her Captain Marvel sequel, citing "the lack of a really solid script."
Earlier this year, she said, "They had a date, and they were prepping certain things, and you just have to lean into the process hardcore. The way they make those films is very different to the way, ideally, I would make a film, so you just have to lean into the process and hope for the best. The best didn’t happen this time, but you kind of have to trust in the machine."
"It was interesting because there was a certain point when I was like, 'Ok, this isn’t going to be the movie that I pitched or even the first version of the movie that I shot,'" DaCosta continued, "so I realised that this is now an experience and it’s learning curve and it really makes you stronger as a filmmaker in terms of your ability to navigate."
Eternals 2 might not be in the works, but a recent rumour claimed to shed some light on Marvel Studios' plans for the character in the post-Avengers: Secret Wars MCU.
Eternals is now streaming on Disney+.