How Eternals Made Sure Its Characters Didn’t Feel Like Other Existing Heroes

Marvel Studios’ Eternals took on the daunting task of introducing nearly a dozen brand new heroes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only does every member of the ancient race have something unique to bring to the franchise from a story perspective, they also have their own power sets, some of which have been seen in other on-screen heroes before. Ikaris has powers like Superman. Makkari is a speedster like Quicksilver or Flash. The powers themselves may not have been new or fresh, but the characters weilding them needed to be.

The VFX team had a tall order when trying to get the look and effects of the Eternals’ powers just right. According to Stephane Ceretti, the film’s VFX Supervisor, the key was connecting all of their powers back to their origin story, so that they all looked more like Eternals than anything else that had come before.

“Obviously, we had a Icarus who is a lot like another guy we know from another house,” Ceretti told ComicBook.com in a recent interview. “And we had a speedster that had to be different from the other speedsters that we had done and other people had done. So there’s always that thing, but I think it’s in the way we shoot their powers and in the way they use their powers. It’s in the way we conceive the look of it. Because they all come from the same source, like the cosmic energies, how they’re built in the World Forge, and their powers are all coming from that, from that same source.”

“So there was a commonality between all these things,” he continued. “And we wanted to reference Jack Kirby and the way he was designing his little lines and circles and triangles, and also tying that into ancient geometry, things that we had seen in old civilizations. And so, it was all kind of a set of powers that we might have seen before in a different shape or in a different context. But we wanted to make it unique to our own story and also make it be that it’s a family of characters. And it’s a family of powers, and they all kind of complete each other in a way.”

Every Eternal draws their power from the same place, so each of their abilities looks fairly similar. The creative tools of Phastos look to be made of the same energy as Kingo’s blasters. This helps keep them rooted in one another and their shared history, instead of other comic book lore.

Marvel Studios’ Eternals is now streaming on Disney+.