When the first trailer for Eternals dropped earlier this year, Marvel Cinematic Universe fans demanded to know why an all-powerful race of immortal aliens had simply sat on the sidelines and watched as Thanos decimated half of all life in the universe with a snap of his fingers, especially when the titular team have strong ties to the Mad Titan.
Besides the obvious answer of ‘because Infinity War and Endgame had wrapped before Eternals entered production’, we’ll be finding out the in-canon reasons when Chloé Zhao’s cosmic epic comes to theaters on November 5. The early reactions to the movie have been mixed, but because this is the MCU we’re talking about, bumper box office is guaranteed.
There will almost certainly be nods, winks and references to the lore, and in a new interview with ComicBook, Kumail Nanjiani teased that Kingo may have connections to some familiar faces we could be seeing explored further down the line.
“Chloe had it all mapped out, and she had a very specific sense of… Because the thing is, Eternals have sort of been in hiding, right? So they haven’t been going around talking to Iron-Man and Captain America and all those people. They’ve been pretending to be normal human beings. But it makes sense that my character would have met another character who’s not from Earth either. I’m trying to be vague. I don’t know what I’m allowed to say or not. So I think that was all part of the stuff, so that even though Eternals really is a standalone movie, you want to feel the presence, and the reality of, the rest of the MCU around it. And Chloe is such a nerd with an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel and the MCU. So she was really excited about dropping these references in.”
In the world of Eternals, Kingo is a major Bollywood movie star who doubles as an intergalactic entity that’s resided on Earth for millennia, so his celebrity status and off-world origins gives him the leeway to interact with just about anybody in the MCU without breaking the franchise’s internal logic.