Chloe Zhao Explains the Unused Bleak Ending Eternals Could Have Had

Kevin Feige announced earlier this year that the MCU’s fourth phase is all about introductions and beginnings, and there was no bigger introduction than Eternals. The film didn’t include any Avenger cameos or many links to the previous MCU story for casual viewers but instead focused its efforts on bringing around a dozen new characters into the Marvel story who had never been seen on screen before, and set up both a sequel and teased the future arrival of Blade in a very subtle way that will not be paid off for a few years. According to director Chloe Zhao, the film’s ending, which saw some of the Eternals being stolen from Earth by the Celestial Arishem, could have been much bleaker than it was.

“No. I have never made a film where the ending is what I wrote! You find it in the edit,” Zhao explained in an interview with Empire. “Editing is a third of the filmmaking process, and when you show it to people, that’s when you find the ending. I don’t think I’ve made a single film where the opening and ending stay the same as the script, just because the scenes are fluid as we shoot. And we actually had another ending that is really bleak. Bleak. I didn’t hate it, because I’m used to films that are more melancholy. But I don’t think it went down well with audiences. It used to end with everybody back on the ship, minds erased and just going on to another planet, like The Twilight Zone. I remember when it goes to black, everyone was like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ And also, it’s the MCU, and you want to be excited for what’s next.”

While the ending of Eternals, with its post credit scenes that introduced Harry Styles as Starfox and teased Kit Harington’s upcoming role as Black Knight, certainly keeps Marvel fans coming back for more in future, it is hard to see how a bleaker ending would have really hurt the movie, except perhaps we don’t know the characters well enough for something like that to pay off just yet. After all, the only time many people have left a cinema in complete shocked silence was after Avengers: Infinity War, when many struggled to take on board that for one of the only times in comic book movie history the bad guy actually won, so when it comes to bleak, that, combined with the death of Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame maybe suggested that it was perhaps a bit too soon to have another dark ending for a group of relative strangers.

Speaking to The Toronto Sun, Eternals producer Nate Moore sort of explained why Zhao’s original ending might have been considered, revealing that there was not necessarily a direct link to a sequel being planned for the film. “It’s not something that is a must-have Obviously, we have ideas of where we could go, but there isn’t a hard and fast rule where we have to have three of these things and this is the first,” he explained.

We know now that the Eternals will return again, but when and how that happens is something we will need to wait a while to discover with a packed Marvel schedule of films taking us through to well into 2023 and plenty of contenders for 2024’s slate already in the works.

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