Chloe Zhao Still Wants An Eternals Sequel, Even If Marvel Does Not

Chloe Zhao Still Isnt Ready To Let Marvels Eternals Go

Marvel Studios Eternals arrived in late 2021 carrying the weight of huge expectations. An Oscar winning filmmaker at the helm, a cast stacked with stars, lavish locations, a promise to open an entirely new cosmic chapter for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead, it quickly became known as the first Marvel movie to be branded Rotten by major review aggregators and a symbol of the studios post Endgame growing pains. For many executives and fans, Eternals was something to move past. For director and co writer Chloe Zhao, though, the film remains unfinished business.

In a recent interview, Zhao made it clear that she would happily step back into the MCU to continue the story of her immortal outsiders. She spoke about the Eternals as a deliberate pantheon of gods, hovering above human history, forced to decide whether our species deserves to continue. For her, that mythic frame is not just window dressing but the entire point. Superhero franchises, she argues, are essentially the modern myths we tell around the campfire, and Eternals was designed as one long argument about what we owe one another as a species. That is why, even after the backlash, she says she is proud of the film and would love to bring these characters back.

The Ambitious Misfire That Shook Marvels Confidence

It is easy to forget how loudly Eternals was meant to announce a new era. The production travelled the world, leaned heavily on natural landscapes instead of green screens, and introduced ten brand new leads in one movie, along with Celestials, Deviants and thousands of years of lore. The bet was that audiences would follow Marvel anywhere. They did not. Critically, the film landed with a thud, and at the box office it underperformed for a movie of its cost and scale. It soon shared its unwanted reputation with other recent misfires like Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania and Captain America Brave New World, signalling a rough patch for the once unstoppable MCU brand.

Inside Marvel, the message seemed clear. President Kevin Feige later confirmed there were no immediate plans for Eternals 2. Quietly, the studio pivoted back toward safer territory, doubling down on Spider Man, Avengers and an eventual X Men reboot rather than attempting another massive, risky ensemble built from scratch. From a business point of view it made sense. Eternals looked like a franchise starter that never started.

What A Sequel Could Have Explored

For Zhao, however, the story of the Eternals ends on a deliberate ellipsis. The cosmic judge Arishem literally drags part of the team into space, announcing that he will return to deliver judgment on humanity after reviewing their memories. Meanwhile, a dead Celestial juts out of the ocean like a mountain sized statue, and scattered survivors wrestle with the ethics of defying their creator to save Earth. In other words, the movie closes at the moment when the philosophical questions really begin.

A sequel could have leaned far harder into that premise. Rather than another world ending beam in the sky, Zhao imagines a drama about gods and demigods debating what makes a civilisation worth preserving. Are we learning from our violence or just repeating it with better tools. Do love, art and community offset the damage we inflict on each other and on the planet. Those questions are already embedded in the first movie, but a follow up could foreground them while tightening the storytelling that many viewers found unwieldy.

It might also finally use some of the toys the first film left scattered across the floor. Harry Styles arriving as Eros, brother of Thanos, Patton Oswalt as Pip the Troll, and a disembodied voice tease for Mahershala Ali as Blade all hinted at strange crossovers that, so far, have gone nowhere. Right now, those tags feel less like tantalising setups and more like an accidental museum of abandoned plans.

Fans Divided Between Disaster And Misunderstood Gem

The wider conversation around Eternals has only grown more complicated with time. For a sizeable chunk of the audience, it is simply one of the weakest Marvel entries. They point to choppy editing that jumps between eras without enough connective tissue, action scenes that occasionally look oddly blurry or inconsistent, and a villain threat that never coheres into anything memorable. Some viewers came out of the cinema feeling as if whole scenes were missing, as if a richer cut of the movie had been left on the editing room floor.

Others compare the main twist about Deviants and Celestials to beats that Captain Marvel had already explored with its misunderstood enemies, making Eternals feel less bold than advertised. The film attempted to juggle heady questions, soap opera romance, quippy banter and heavy exposition across ten protagonists, and for plenty of people it just collapsed under its own ambitions. A few harsher critics say it is the moment they mentally checked out of the MCU altogether.

Yet there is another camp that still defends the movie. These viewers see an imperfect but intriguing outlier that was punished for being different. They praise the films global ensemble, the grounded locations, the way Makkari redefined what a speedster could look like on screen, and the melancholic take on a superman figure through Ikaris. For them, the movie was not some unwatchable disaster but a flawed cosmic epic that deserved a smarter follow up rather than to be quietly buried.

A Victim Of Timing And Expectations

One reason the debate feels so heated is that Eternals landed at a tense moment for Marvel. Endgame had wrapped up a decade of storytelling with unprecedented hype. After that, anything that did not immediately feel like another Avengers level event was likely to be dismissed. On top of that, Disney had trained a portion of its own fandom to wait for new releases to hit streaming, undermining theatrical momentum. Eternals, with its slow burn structure and more sombre tone, was never going to play like a crowd pleasing crossover reunion, yet it was marketed as the next big must see chapter.

Some fans argue that, instead of learning the right lessons from the films mixed reception, Marvel panicked. In the rush to pump out more projects across film and television, budgets were reshuffled, visual effects teams were stretched thin, and scripts often felt like lighter, cheaper echoes of older hits. In that context, Eternals starts to look less like the problem and more like the last messy attempt at something genuinely new before the content machine took over.

Where The Eternals Are Now In The MCU

On screen, the characters themselves have mostly been sidelined. Kumail Nanjianis movie star Kingo has popped up again only in animated form in an episode of the multiverse anthology series What If. The enormous fossilised Celestial in the ocean has finally been acknowledged as a geopolitical headache in Captain America Brave New World, but mostly as a background plot device rather than the centre of a story. There is no serious buzz about Eros, Pip or the remaining team members joining Avengers Doomsday or the multiverse saga finale Secret Wars.

Behind the scenes, the fallout has been personal too. Nanjiani has spoken about signing what was supposed to be a grand Marvel package involving multiple films, a video game and even a theme park ride, only to watch the entire plan evaporate once the numbers came in. The backlash hit him hard enough that he says he went to therapy afterwards. It is a reminder that box office narratives are not just abstract studio math; they impact careers, self worth and the types of stories that get greenlit next.

Marvels Current Priorities Leave Little Room

Meanwhile, Marvel Studios is staring down its first real era of franchise fatigue. With audiences pickier and budgets under scrutiny, the company is concentrating on proven draws. More Spider Man, more Avengers, and a long awaited reboot of the X Men are all lined up as attempts to steady the ship. In that environment, the idea of investing hundreds of millions in a sequel to a divisive ensemble film that casual viewers barely remember feels, in corporate terms, like a very tough sell.

Even fans who would happily watch another instalment admit that the studio has more pressing fires to put out. At best, they imagine an Eternals follow up arriving only after the multiverse dust settles, perhaps repositioned as a smaller, more focused character piece rather than a giant cosmic thesis statement. Others suspect that a reality reshaping event like Secret Wars will quietly erase or rewrite the Eternals storyline altogether, allowing Marvel to cherry pick ideas without having to address the original films loose threads.

Chloe Zhao Moves On, But The Idea Lingers

Chloe Zhao herself is not waiting around. Away from the MCU, she is premiering Hamnet, a historical drama riffing on the life that may have inspired Shakespeare, with Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley in the lead roles. She is also involved in a new take on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another project steeped in myth, monsters and moral questions about power and destiny. In other words, even if Marvel never calls again, she is still chasing the same big, messy ideas that drove Eternals, just in different universes.

Some observers worry that the Marvel backlash stalled what had been a meteoric rise after her Oscar wins, turning her first blockbuster into a cautionary tale. Yet when she talks about the film, there is little bitterness, more a sense that the experiment was worth trying even if the marketplace rejected it. To her, the core remains powerful: immortal beings debating whether humanity deserves another chance, forcing us to measure ourselves against the gods we imagine.

Should Eternals Ever Return

Will Arishem spare humanity. Will Ikaris ever be seen again. Will Harry Styles and Patton Oswalt get more than a handful of seconds in the MCU. Realistically, the answer for now is no. But the conversation around Eternals continues to flare up precisely because it sits at the crossroads of so many tensions in modern blockbuster culture. Audiences say they want new stories but punish them when they are messy. Studios crave safe bets yet worry about creative stagnation. Fans insist that everything must connect, even as abandoned teasers pile up.

In that sense, Eternals may already have fulfilled its role as myth. It holds up a mirror to our habits as viewers and as an industry, asking whether we are actually as adventurous as we claim. Chloe Zhao would love another swing at the story. Many viewers would rather it stay buried. Between those two impulses, Marvel has to decide what kind of gods it wants to be and how much faith it still has in us.