If you're looking for the next major super team which the MCU will revolve around, The Eternals is a pretty good bet. Marvel has been keeping a tight lid on any info about the film, which has indie filmmaker Chloe Zhao (The Rider) on board to direct and a star-studded, versatile cast led by Angelina Jolie, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry, and more. It has a lot of people excited, most of all Kevin Feige who couldn't keep from talking about the film's major role in Marvel's Phase 4 plans.
Feige opened up about The Eternals while attending last weekend's CCXP in Brazil, which is quickly catching up to Comic-Con as the place for big pop culture breaking news. He says right the idea was to do something "different" with this film, and that meant expanding the scope with “an epic that spans 7,000 years of human history, has cosmic connotations, changes everything we know about the MCU. And that is what we want it to do.” The film will cover “from present-day to Mesopotamia to all sorts of locations and time periods and really feels like nothing we’ve done before.”
If you know anything about The Eternals, that doesn't seem so far-fetched. The alien race of near-immortals were created by the godlike Celestials an as evolutionary offshoot defending all of humanity. So yeah, pretty epic and definitely cosmic.
The hiring of Zhao, while pre-dating Martin Scorsese's inflammatory rhetoric that Marvel films aren't cinema, nevertheless seems like a direct answer to such critiques when described by Feige...
“She’s a giant fan of the MCU. A giant fan of cinema. And is an incredible filmmaker that has brought a new look and a new vision to the MCU,” Feige said.
And rest assured, there will be some kind of encounter with the Avengers at a future date, which Feige expertly teased...
“The Eternals know about the existence of the Avengers but the Avengers don’t know much about the Eternals…yet,” Feige teased. “The MCU is all interconnected and we like to focus on one movie at a time…and keep evolving their stories. And yes, it’s always fun to see them come together in a master plan that I promise you is well underway."
The Eternals opens on November 6th 2020.
