Before Eternals was released in theaters in 2021, excitement for the movie was through the roof. 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 cast of The Avengers.
When the reviews poured in, it was deemed Marvel Studios' first "Rotten" movie on Rotten Tomatoes. Throw in the fact that it dropped during the final months of the pandemic, and 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, there was plenty about Eternals that did work. Still, four years later, Marvel Studios hasn't announced plans to resolve the movie's cliffhanger (and there's nothing to suggest we'll reunite with these characters anywhere).
Talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Zhao explained why she took a four-year break after Eternals. "I needed a break after Eternals and Nomadland because these two films were very intense," the filmmaker said with a laugh. "[They were] back-to-back, making them and coming out. So I think it was the accumulation of a decade of me working non-stop."
Asked if she's nervous about how critics will respond to her newest movie, Hamnet, after Nomadland drew rave reviews and Eternals was panned, she explained, "I think it’s like when you have a child. You do whatever you can to raise them, and you probably made mistakes along the way, [things] that you wish you’d done better."
"I’m speaking for the last two films I had that came out the same time [Nomadland and Eternals] — then you send them out into the world, and the world will have very unexpected reactions towards them that you have no control of," Zhao continued. "You have to learn to love the imperfection of your children, because that is loving the imperfection in yourself. And that wasn’t an easy process for me last time."
The Eternals director wasn't sitting around feeling sorry for herself during those four years, as she developed Hamnet and is closely involved with the upcoming Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Kiera Armstrong.
"Well, I don’t think it’s a secret [to say] that I am working on Buffy the Vampire Slayer," she told the trade, noting, "It’s going well."
Had things played out differently, there's a very good chance the Eternals would've had a sequel by now. At the very least, we'd have seen them lined up for a significant role in Avengers: Doomsday. Instead, the immortal heroes are lost in the cosmos and left on the shelf.