Designing costumes for a live-action superhero blockbuster requires striking the right balance; the outfits need to both reflect and respect the comic book origins so as not to piss of the fanbase, but also have a practical in-canon explanation for why the characters feel compelled to suit up in such outlandish duds.
Some fans still bristle at Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin armor from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, while longtime X-Men enthusiasts were up in arms when the Fox franchise favored leather jumpsuits over anything even remotely resembling the team’s signature look.
In a set visit interview via ScreenRant, Marvel Studios producer Nate Moore explains how Eternals wanted to avoid the X-Men trap and create vibrant costumes for the title beings, but also ground their suits in backstory.
“When you have this many characters, one of the challenges is to not, no disrespect, to not put them all in black X-Men uniforms. To give them all personality, but to also make it feel like a whole. To make it feel like they came from the same place because, unlike the Avengers who all have their own mythologies and are brought together, these people all come from the same place.”
The team looked to have pulled it off, with all of the Eternals’ costumes bearing at least a couple of superficial similarities to make it clear they all got them from the same place at roughly the same time, while also giving each of their number a distinct and unique look.
That can’t have been easy when there were ten main characters to deal with, but it also helps that many audiences won’t be familiar with the Eternals at all, giving the movie a little creative leeway when it came to kitting them out.