We haven’t heard any concrete news surrounding the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Eternals for months, besides the studio recently dropping the ‘The’ from the title. Minor cosmetic changes aside, anticipation is starting to rise for the intergalactic epic, which has the potential to bring something completely unique to a franchise that’s been around for well over a decade, which is no easy feat.
There’s only a little over five months to go until Eternals hits theaters, meaning that we surely can’t be too far away from a debut trailer, and Marvel might even be considering attaching it to November’s Black Widow in an effort to draw some extra paying customers into the slowly-recovering theatrical industry.
All we have to go on so far is rumors and speculation without even so much as an official image to look at, but in a new interview, director Chloe Zao dropped some hints about how she’s approaching the material, and it sounds pretty exciting.
“I have such deep, strong, manga roots. I brought some of that into Eternals. And I look forward to pushing more of that marriage of East and West. How much further and bigger can we go after Endgame? Because I’m not just making the film as a director. I’m making the film as a fan.”
Aiming to match the single highest-grossing movie in history is certainly ambitious, and even if Eternals can’t hit those heights, it will still be breaking ground as the first MCU project to feature a same sex relationship, which some people have already decided is enough reason to boycott the cosmic adventure.
Zao went on to explain that she wanted her ensemble cast and the various interpersonal dynamics to reflect the society that we live in, even if the story does take place over thousands of years and focus on a group of immortal aliens.
“I wanted it to reflect the world we live in. But also I wanted to put a cast together that feels like a group of misfits. I didn’t want the jocks. I want you to walk away at the end of the movie not thinking, ‘This person is this ethnicity, that person is that nationality’. No. I want you to walk away thinking, ‘That’s a family’. You don’t think about what they represent. You see them as individuals.”
On paper, Eternals looks like the MCU’s biggest gamble since Guardians of the Galaxy, and if it can replicate both the critical and commercial success of the franchise’s last band of misfits, then fans and casual audiences alike could be in for something pretty special.