Back in 2015, we got word that writer John Ridley (U Turn, Three Kings, 12 Years a Slave) was working on an untitled series for Marvel Television and ABC, and we now know what the show was going to be based on.
While chatting to the Comic Book Club podcast, the Academy Award-winner revealed that the long-defunct series was going to be a small-screen take on Eternals... "but good."
“My version, or the good version, was so f*cking weird,” Ridley recalled. “There was my version, a good version, which is good to me, which that doesn’t mean anything. There was the version that [Marvel] ended up doing, which I don’t think that version was particularly good, I’ll be honest.”
The project was ultimately scrapped along with several others when Marvel Television was folded into Marvel Studios, who would go on to release an Eternals movie directed by Chloé Zhao in 2021. While the film certainly has its share of defenders, it's probably accurate to say quite a few people would agree with Ridley's assessment.
Ridley went on to outline what would have been the pilot episode of his Eternals show.
“My version started with, the first thing you see is a young man, probably about 17, 18 years old. And he’s sitting there. He’s sitting there for a moment. And then he lifts his hands. He has a drill in it. And he turns the drill on. And he puts the drill to his ear. And he starts pushing it in. And then it goes from there. That’s how it starts. And then I think you see another kid. He sleeps in the bathtub, covers himself with foil. It’s just a really weird story about these people who are, I mean, it’s just weird.”
It certainly sounds like an interesting take on the super-team, but Ridley admits that it was a “really hard property [to develop],” and he'd later come to the conclusion that “the best thing to happen for everybody was that it didn’t happen with me, because I don’t know that it would have been entertaining [for all].”
He added, “I do mean what’s entertaining to me is often not populist, which is great for a lot of the work I do, but this needed to be a little bit more popular, it really did.”
There have been persistent rumors that an Eternals sequel is in development, but we still haven't had any official word.