Honest opinion: Chloe Zhao’s “Eternals” was not as bad as reviews made it out to be. Now, I’m not saying it was a “good” movie, but it surely was better, and more ambitious, than ‘Thor: Love and Thunder,’ ‘Dr. Strange 3,’ ‘Ant-Man 3,’ or even ‘Black Widow.’
At least Zhao’s film had some kind of vision to it and didn’t adhere to every single convention an MCU movie must have. Yes, it failed in its ambitions, and the result is a film that Disney, Zhao and the whole ensemble want to forget, but there have been far worse.
‘Eternals’ star Kumail Nanjiani is of the belief that the film was unfairly graded by critics and audiences. In fact, in a recent episode of the Inside of You podcast, he says that Marvel thought it was going to be “really, really well reviewed”:
It was really, really hard because Marvel thought that movie was going to be really, really well reviewed, so they lifted the embargo early and put it in some fancy movie festivals and they sent us on a big global tour to promote the movie right as the embargo lifted.
The opposite happened. “Eternals” was trashed by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes it’s at 47% which renders it as the second worst reviewed MCU movie. Harsh, right? Nanjiani said he had “trauma” over the way the film was received:
The reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it. I was reading every review and checking too much […] I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie. It was really hard, and that was when I thought it was unfair to me and unfair to [my wife] Emily, and I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some shit has to change, so I started counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that.
He continued, “Emily says that I do have trauma from it. We actually just got dinner with somebody else from that movie and we were like, ‘That was tough, wasn’t it?’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, that was really tough,’ and I think we all went through something similar.”
Based on the film I had seen in the fall of 2021, I wasn’t expecting Zhao’s film to be as disappointing as it was. Coming off her Oscar winner, “Nomadland”, expectations were sky high in the hopes that it could go down as one of the better MCU movies. It wasn’t. Still, the visuals were fairly well-realized, but that ballooning 157-minute runtime was not needed.
“Eternals” ended up making $402 million worldwide on a $240 million budget. Disney and Marvel lost a lot of money on this one. There’s been a very slight reappraisal of the film, some comparing it to the way Ang Lee’s “Hulk” is now perceived, in some circles — sadly, for Zhao and company, what Lee’s film has going for it is that it’s actually good.
Of course, we all know the rule: take these reactions with a grain of salt rather than treating them as gospel. Still, I will say that the film tested like gangbusters earlier this year, and Lionsgate clearly has confidence.