It's funny ... for me The Eternals for me was the moment I knew the MCU was dead to me ... because unlike everyone else ... I liked it.
At the time, looking on all of the comic and MCU fans criticising it, I couldn't help but notice that there was a kinda lack of appreciation of the film as a film and that most criticism came from some relatively undefined (or unspoken) expectation of epicness and big-arc tie-in momentum. And at the time, I personally predicted that the MCU was going to "fail" because its fans didn't quite know what they wanted except for some massive hype dopamine hit to cheer along to in the cinema.
Which is great, except that the MCU had clearly bottomed out with its ability to do that in Infinity War (clearly better than Endgame IMO) and was trying to spread its wings and create films and characters with different vibes and energies ... all within the same universe. I was there for it and rather enjoyed Eternals. Many said it wasn't an MCU film ... and I was like yea ... that's why I enjoyed it. It seemed pretty clear to me that the MCU and its fans were in a mutually dependent downward spiral. And if you look at what's come out since then, it sure looks like that's come to pass.
If MCU fans (and producers) had understood that you gotta enjoy different palettes and vibes to enrich the universe and make the big moments hit hard ... the MCU could have been an rather interesting film phenomenon by leveraging comic's ability/tradition to fuse sci-fi and fantasy at multiple scales. Instead, what we've gotten since Inifinity War is a fusion that's taken all the worse parts, IMO.
Interesting! I suspect it's one of those things that's a reasonably good divider or litmus test.
Like there are two kinds of MCU fans ... those that hated Eternals and those who liked or appreciated it.
And, not to be snobby or anything ... but maybe finding a way to make both types of fans happy was the key, and instead the MCU has probably tried to listen a bit too much to the haters.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It was a television version of The Eternals… but good,” Ridley recently told the Comic Book Club podcast of his planned ABC series.
“There was the version that [Marvel] ended up doing,” Ridley went on to add, referring to Chloé Zhao’s 2021 movie.
His body of work speaks to his talent, just as it did for Chloe Zhao ahead of her movie version.
But they all knew their scopes, even when they did lean more into the fantastical, they worked for the medium and scale they were telling their stories in, and played with that freedom even as their cinematic siblings kept giving them the cold shoulder.
This is, however, to knock the Marvel TV we were getting at the time (or a couple years later at least) that honestly is more closer to what Eternals would’ve had to do on ABC: Inhumans.
There is forever a chance, even though we’ll never see it, that an Eternals TV show could’ve been the “But Good” version.
The original article contains 508 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
