Marvel Announces Eternals Film

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So, let’s talk about The Eternals.  These folks are, allegedly, going to be Marvel’s next big thing going into phase 4 and the 2020s.  I use the word “allegedly” there because I feel like we’ve definitely been here before and done the “next big thing” dance enough times for it to feel decidedly old hat by now.  In particular, we were last here in 2017 when Marvel spent 2 years and countless comics trying to make the Inhumans into their next big thing only for the property to completely flame out after ½ a season of subpar television.  

Even if you LIKED the Inhumans TV show there’s no denying the concentrated effort to rebrand the Inhumans as the new it thing from Marvel was both a failure and embarrassment, especially with how much they’ve receded from the public eye at this point.  One wonders if the Eternals, a very similar group conceptually, aren’t just Marvel’s new flavor of the month, to be forgotten within a few short years of their culmination? 

For the uninitiated, the Eternals are one of three groups of secret races that have helped fill out the Marvel comics universe, most notable for being the last of said three groups.  Created in the mid-70s by Marvel scribe Jack Kirby, the Eternals were, for all intents and purposes, an excuse for Kirby to keep producing comics in the style of his New Gods books after leaving DC.  

At the time Marvel was VERY invested in this particular style of colorful super team, mainly owing to Chris Clairemont, Len Wein, and Dave Cockrum’s revamp of the X-Men in 1975 into the team of mutants we all know and love today.  Incidentally, the X-Men are going to be key to this story so bear that in mind but I’ll get back to the business angle in just a bit. 

So, the Eternals are a group of powerful cosmic beings who resemble various gods, most notably the Greek Gods though they are not, in fact, the Greek Gods, who are also real and hang out with Thor- it’s needlessly confusing, as was much continuity in the ‘70s.  

Their origin is that eons ago a group of space-based cosmic giants called the Celestials came to Earth and foresaw mankind’s potential for super-powered mutants.  Intrigued by this, the Celestials took a handful of humans and genetically altered them to create 2 distinct races: the Eternals who possessed phenomenal cosmic power and beauty and the Deviants a race of hideous but powerful monsters. 

The Eternals have banged around the comics ever since the ‘70s but have never really enjoyed longstanding popularity.  They mostly appeared in the Thor comics as ‘70s Thor was all about weird cosmic stuff, along with a brief stint tied to the X-Men as their villain Apocalypse owes his origins to the Celestials as well.  

Their most recent iteration was in a mostly very good comic revival from Neil Gaiman that revealed the various Eternals had lost their memories and been living amongst humanity till they became awakened.  The Gaiman comic, which has a lot of American Gods overtones to it, feels like the clearest way to approach a movie version of this property without just retreading the ground Thor already covered. 

“Retread” really is the central impression I get from making the Eternals Marvel’s new tent pole as we barrel towards the new decade.  I’m actually a pretty big fan of the characters but there’s so much about them that feels derivative of more popular works it’s hard not to interpret this as just an attempt to replace franchises without re-upping contracts.  

Firstly, the story of a bunch of God-themed cosmic aliens who’ve had a history on Earth for years pretty much IS Thor, a point so blatant that even the old ‘70s Thor comics had to draw attention to it with the Greek Gods actually declaring war on the Eternals. 

That point of similarity really makes it seem like Eternals is being pitched as a kind of off-brand Thor, something that preserves the visuals aesthetics and tone without having to hire back Tom Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth now they’ve become much more expensive.  I’m not totally sure this will be the approach, especially given Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie proved incredibly popular in Thor: Ragnarok and I think there’s absolutely a market for a solo film starring her.  

What’s more, Marvel has already spent the better half of a decade trying to turn the character of Angela, Thor’s long lost sister, into someone of note in the comics so it feels like if they wanted to continue the Thor name and franchise with Hemsworth in a reduced IE cheaper role she and Valkyrie would make more sense than Eternals. 

There’s also the possibility the Eternals are a lingering X-Men stand-in, like the Inhumans.  Both groups basically functioned as X-Men also-rans in the mid-‘70s after the success of Giant Sized X-Men #1 and the entire push of the Inhumans from 2015-2017 was to be the new version of the mutants that Marvel maintained total copyright control over.  This one I’m not quite as sure about as a lot has been made lately about Disney purchasing Fox’s entire IP library, including both the X-Men and Fantastic Four.  

With that deal pushing towards a more or less unpreventable conclusion the idea that Marvel would set about the serious work of creating an all-new X-Men stand-in group, especially after Inhumans bombed hard, seems really unlikely.  There’s always the chance this is a very long and obtuse goal of setting up the Eternals and Celestials to build up to a Marvel version of Apocalypse, but by the same token, his garbage adaptation in the 2016 film probably means that isn’t the case.

Overall the strangest aspect of this Eternals announcement is the idea it’s going to serve as some kind of a lynchpin going forward.  So far Marvel’s big central figures as we move into the 2020s have been Black Panther and Spider-Man with Captain Marvel waiting to really take the reigns in 2019.  The Eternals don’t really have a connection to any of those characters or the Avengers as a whole, they’ve always done their own thing for the most part.  

Traditionally the Eternals do have ties to Thanos but that doesn’t seem to have crossed over to the films and while they could connect to whatever the origin of Captain Marvel’s powers turns out to be, the franchise they have any concrete ties to is Guardians of the Galaxy, thanks to a cameo by the Celestials in the first film.  So call me less than optimistic here at the outset, maybe as more details emerge the Eternals will show itself to have a clearer identity than the table scraps of Thor and the X-Men but for now I don’t think anyone was desperate for the Inhumans redux it’s coming off as. 

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