Marvel hired a Best Director winner exactly once. Five years after Eternals, it hasn't tried again
Eternals opened five years ago this week, got branded the MCU's first flop, and out-grossed most of what Marvel has released since it stopped experimenting.
Eternals opened on November 5, 2021, and its anniversary thread on r/boxoffice reads like a rehabilitation hearing. The film Marvel's fandom spent 2021 calling the franchise's first failure — 47% on Rotten Tomatoes, the MCU's first rotten score — finished with $402 million worldwide in a pandemic-dented market. Five years of hindsight have repriced that number:
"Even if this movie did contribute to superhero movie burnout, in hindsight that WW gross isn't even that bad compared to The Marvels, Supergirl, etc"
The comparison holds up in the ledger. The Marvels finished at $206 million worldwide in 2023. Supergirl stalled around $125 million this summer. The "flop" of 2021 would be a top-tier result for a non-Avengers cape movie in 2026.
Eternals earned $402 million and was declared a disaster. The Marvels earned $206 million. Supergirl earned $125 million.
The experiment that didn't get a second run
The number that matters more than the gross is one: Eternals remains the only MCU film directed by a winner of the Best Director Oscar. Marvel hired Chloé Zhao months after Nomadland swept the Academy Awards, handed her a cosmic ensemble, and when the reviews came back rotten, the experiment quietly closed. No sequel was prioritized, the Eternals aren't expected in Doomsday or Secret Wars, and no filmmaker of that profile has been handed an MCU film since.
Zhao has spent the anniversary press cycle being more honest about the production than Marvel ever was. The telling quote came from her Vanity Fair interview:
"'Eternals' didn't have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous."
— Chloé Zhao, to Vanity Fair
She also told the Awards Chatter podcast the project wasn't high on Marvel's priority list before she signed on. Her follow-up is Hamnet, a Shakespeare grief drama with Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley that premiered on the fall festival circuit and opens November 27 — made, by her own account, on the limitations Eternals never had. At Venice this fall she was still defending comic-book movies as stories not to write off, which is a generosity the genre hasn't returned.
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The lesson Marvel learned backwards
The studio read 2021 as proof that risk fails. The five years since have been the sequel-and-legacy era — and the grosses kept falling anyway, through Quantumania, The Marvels, and a Captain America nobody remembers by summer. Auteur risk didn't cause that slide; it was the first thing thrown overboard while the slide continued.
Which brings this anniversary to Avengers: Doomsday, out December 18: Robert Downey Jr. back as the villain, the Russos back behind the camera, original X-Men in the chairs — the most expensive no-risk bet Marvel has ever placed. If it works, the studio will call the last five years vindicated. Eternals at $402 million will still be sitting there in the ledger, asking what the experiments would have grossed in a healthy year.
Previously we wrote: Taika Waititi just pulled a Kevin Smith on Klara and the Sun's critics