Chloé Zhao teases Eternals’ original bummer ending
The Oscar-winning filmmaker originally took audiences to a trip to The Twilight Zone
Aux News Chloé Zhao
This article discusses the plot of Eternals
Chloé Zhao’s Eternals lives with Zack Snyder’s Justice League as one of the year’s most divisive superhero movies. Pushing bladders to the brink, the two-and-a-half-hour-long Eternals almost left audiences with a sour taste in their mouths. In a new interview with Empire, Zhao hints at just how “bleak” her original ending was before she corrected it in the edit.
“We actually had another ending that is really bleak,” Zhao told Empire. “I didn’t hate it, because I’m used to films that are more melancholy. But I don’t think it went down well with audiences.”
Zhao says that she pulled the ending back from the brink of a full-on existential breakdown because audiences want to leave superhero movies somewhat optimistic about the future—well, future installments of the MCU.
“It used to end with everybody back on the ship, minds erased, and just going on to another planet, like The Twilight Zone. I remember when it goes to black, everyone was like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ And also, it’s the MCU, and you want to be excited for what’s next.”
Finding the ending during the editing process is all part of the process, says Zhao, and one that she’s relied on for her other work. “I have never made a film where the ending is what I wrote! You find it in the edit,” she said. “Editing is a third of the filmmaking process, and when you show it to people, that’s when you find the ending. I don’t think I’ve made a single film where the opening and ending stay the same as the script, just because the scenes are fluid as we shoot.”
Eternals’ Oscar-winning pedigree didn’t earn the movie an automatic favor with critics. The A.V. Club’s film editor A.A. Dowd called it “just another Marvel movie.” He continues:
Eternals proves, maybe once and for all, that who’s behind the camera of these quality-controlled blockbusters may not matter so much. What’s the difference in shooting a real landscape and just generating one on a laptop if it’s going to serve as wallpaper for another round of visually undistinguished comic-book combat? As an action movie, Marvel’s latest offers more of the weightless digital same: variably convincing avatars of the actors darting across ashen beachfronts, tossing fireballs and tendrils.
Despite the middling reviews from us and other publications, audiences turned out for Eternals. The movie didn’t make Spider-Man money, making it a “bomb” in the Marvel sense of the term—if earning $400 million could ever be considered a failure.
Nevertheless, the ending would always feature Eros, Thanos’ dreamy brother, played by Harry Styles. Surely Harry and his jawline would’ve cheered audiences up after enduring Zhao’s original ending, right?
26 Comments
That’s strange. I’m sure I read the article but I can’t remember anything in it.
That’s what happens every time I watch a DCEU movie.
A quick summary: something about something that didn’t happen in a Marvel movie cribbed from an interview that the author of the piece didn’t read, but saw mentioned on Twitter.I also did not read the article.
Maybe she may turned in something that would have elevated the MCU in all sorts of ways and Disney said “No, we need something that fits the current MCU and won’t cause issues”
Maybe the article describes what happened so you don’t have to guess
Maybe it’s Maybelline…wait
Maybelline is never coming back. Not after what you did.
The biggest issue with the movie isn’t that the ending is more open-ended than what’s described here; it’s that Sersi, the emotional heart of the movie on paper, is the most poorly defined of the main characters and is not really elevated by the acting. Ajax has more personality, and she’s technically dead before the movie starts.
It’s also hard to believe that this ending would have done anything to the MCU except hang around waiting to be undone, not so much because audiences demand optimism as that it renders the characters unusable for the next big team-up thing.
Exactly. “Eternals” would’ve been this weird, self-contained dead-end. Why would Marvel spend $200 million and expend a precious theatrical release date to introduce a slew of new characters that would have no substantial impact on the larger MCU and would never return? (Granted, they may not return anyway due to a relative lack of audience enthusiasm, but that original ending would’ve all but guaranteed it.)
Or maybe her idea for the ending was as bad as every other idea in the movie.
The deleted scene where the eternals all shit in buckets will transport you with its raw authenticity.
Chloé Zhao’s Eternals lives with Zack Snyder’s Justice League as one of the year’s most divisive superhero movies.Uhh, I thought the consensus was clear.Justice League sucked (except to hardcore Zack Snyder fans), Zack Snyder’s Justice League was better (but way longer, but still not particularly good, but not bad because it got to expand on the story, at the cost of hours of our lives, except to hardcore Zack Synder fans), and Eternals was just bad.
My biggest problem with this movie: you never really believe these people are thousands of years old.For an example of a movie that did that right, see The Old Guard.
I had that same problem with “Fred Claus.”
I wasn’t really a fan of The Old Guard, but I agree with your complaint about Eternals. They’re all hashing out conflicts and emotional crises that they should have settled millenia ago.
Yeah, some movies can pull off the weariness/experience of immortality, but ETERNALS sure didn’t. A lot of vampire movies get the attitude right – behavior like what’s in ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE is more what I’d imagine would happen if people had power, time to build skills/hobbies, and no real goals.
TBH I was willing to shove that under “because they’re robots, obviously.” Granted I did pretty much go see it for Kumail Nanjiani, so….
So someone created a deaf robot…?
And a permanent child robot.
“Pushing bladders to the brink, the two-and-a-half-hour-long Eternals almost left audiences with a sour taste in their mouths.”This is a weird sentence. This sentence is weird.
Just replace “sour” with “salty”.
Yeah, this feels like an attempt to bump old content and rehash a lot of AVClub writers’ well known, though demonstrably incorrect, view of the MCU as pure factory formula.
Eternals’ being underwhelming is a disproof of concept. Most people who sing the praises of the MCU called Eternals underwhelming. It absolutely DOES matter who is behind the camera in the MCU, it has to be someone who can balance vision against restraint. Neither a pure auteur iconoclast nor medicre journeyman will work. And the failure of others (Universal, WB/DC) to replicate this model shows either that it ISN’T a formula, or that the formula itself is so difficult to maintain that it’s almost an art form in itself.
It would have been a better movie. If the point was that they were designed where they can’t change and it was all about humanity’s worthiness, it would have been good.They could have done the same end credits scene, but have them be freed of their loop and given free will.
That might have actually worked well considering the bummer beginning and bummer middle.
“So what do you say, guys? Should we do the bummer ending or the Mortal Kombat ending?”
In the producers cut, all the Eternals decide to settle in China because quote “China is awesome!!” and then they all high-five.