Eternals: Marvel Confirms No “Immediate Plans” for Sequel

By Marvel standards, Chloe Zhao’s Eternals was both a critical and commercial failure. Upon its release, the flick quickly became the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s worst-reviewed film and remains towards the bottom of the rankings; only Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has a lower Rotten Tomatoes score. Suffice it to say, not many are clamoring for a direct follow-up to the film, and that’s something Marvel Studios is keeping its eyes on. Studio head Kevin Feige says there are no plans in the works for Eternals 2.

“There are no immediate plans for Eternals 2,” Kevin Feige told Inverse on the press tour for Deadpool & Wolverine. “There are, and I think you’ve seen maybe in a trailer we’ve released recently, an acknowledgment of some of those events. Certain giant things came out of the ocean.”

Why isn’t Eternals 2 getting made?

Eternals ended up grossing just over $400 million at the global box office, a far cry from the ticket totals of other MCU movies. Even some that appeared in the movie spoke to the trauma the film’s poor reception caused them.

“I knew it wasn’t me. I think that there were a lot of things that went into it. I love that movie and I’m very proud of that movie. I’ve seen that movie a bunch of times because it’s my kind of movie, and a lot of my stuff I don’t watch. It was really, really hard because Marvel thought that movie was going to be really, really well reviewed, so they lifted the embargo early and put it in some fancy movie festivals and they sent us on a big global tour to promote the movie right as the embargo lifted,” Kumail Nanjiani once said on an episode of Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum.

“The reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it. I was reading every review and checking too much. I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not many much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie,” he added. “It was really hard and that was when I thought it was unfair to me and unfair to Emily and I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some shit’s gotta change, so I started counseling and I still talk to my therapist about that.”

Eternals is now streaming on Disney+.