Marvel’s Eternals left fans with plenty to debate about, but undoubtedly one of the biggest talking points before the movie was even out was the post-credits scene that introduced pop star Harry Styles to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thanos’ brother, Eros. While Styles made headlines, it was also something of a big deal that comedic actor, super-geek, and agents of SHIELD star Patton Oswald also got his official MCU debut as Pip The Troll. Unfortunately, Pip’s introduction didn’t impress Marvel fans the way it probably should have. Thanks to a new interview with Eternals VFX supervisors, we now know more about why.
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Stephane Ceretti, VFX Supervisor on Eternals, and Matt Aitken, WETA Digital VFX Supervisor both did a lengthy interview with The Wrap, and the two ended up being quite frank about the situation. As the two reveal, Pip the Troll was rushed into Eternals after the film cut an alternate ending scene with just Harry Styles:
“It was still with Harry Styles actually, but it was in the spaceship with all the other Eternals,” Ceretti It was a little bit more sad, and not as exciting in a way, so it didn’t kind of resonate. Chloe had that idea of bringing Pip, the troll, as his sidekick for the end of the movie. We did that pretty quick at the end.”
Aitken confirms as much, saying “Yeah.”
Ceretti then seems to let the cat fully out of the bag, saying “Let’s be honest.” He then kind of, sort of, acknowledges the elephant in the room by adding that “it was a bit challenging to get that done in time, but we did what we could. It turned out okay.”
By now it’s no secret that most Marvel fans (and general moviegoers) thought Pip the Troll was one of the most poorly-rendered Marvel CGI characters that we’ve ever seen onscreen. At the time Eternals was released in theaters, there was pretty significant social media chatter about how and why Marvel Studios would clear such a poorly-staged character introduction – even if fans loved Oswalt in the role. This interview explains a lot.
Ceretti was equally forthcoming about the big challenges the VFX team faced making Eternals, while speaking to ComicBook.com:
“We’ve never done a visual effects film like that. And [Chloe Zhao] wants to shoot it our own way, in a very indie way, with a limited team and crew around her and go on in all these locations and not shoot on a blue screen… And we just went for it, but it was a challenge.
I mean, there’s so many designs and ideas in the film that we had to figure out, that we had to bring all these brilliant visual effects vendors to help us. And also, the design departments at Marvel, the costume people, the production designers. And obviously all of that driven strongly by Chloe and her vision of the world. So that was a lot. That was a lot.”
Eternals is now streaming on Disney+.
