Eternals is hitting Disney Plus next month
The newest MCU film has brought in $385 million at the box office
Aux News Disney
Marvel has finally announced when Eternals will be free to stream (for subscribers) on Disney+. The movie, which opened on November 5, will be available on the platform starting January 12. Like many of the Marvel movies on the platform, it will be available in the IMAX aspect ratio.
That two-month window between theatrical and streaming release is in line with what Marvel and Disney decided to do with this September’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Shang-Chi opened nationwide on September 3, and was available for streaming on Disney+ starting November 12.
Meanwhile, July’s Black Widow didn’t hit Disney+ for all subscribers until October 6, seven months after its release. The film had been available with “premier access,” since its initial release, which cost viewers $30 on top of their subscription. The rest of Marvel’s 2021 releases ultimately abandoned that premium model, possibly because Scarlett Johansson sued Disney because of it. Disney and ScarJo ultimately settled for a reported $40 million.
Eternals, which stars Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani, Kit Harington and Bryan Tyree Henry, has grossed $385 million at the box office.
That put it behind Shang-Chi’s $432 million but ahead of Black Widow’s $379 million. Marvel still has the chance to make up some box office ground starting December 17, when the much-hyped Spider-man: No Way Home hits theaters. The newest installment will be in theaters only, and ticket sales will depend on how shy people feel heading out given the new Omicron variant.
Eternals also had the lowest rated Rotten Tomatoes score of any MCU film. Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao helmed the film, but the pairing didn’t work for many. Marvel has yet to announce a sequel to the film. Zhao told The Playlist that she would love to work with Marvel again, saying “I would be back in a second working with the team at Marvel, for sure.”
33 Comments
Sweet!Wasn’t really interested in seeing this in the theater but I will probably hit up Spider-Man the day after xmas if the local theater(reopened under new owners thankfully!) has Sunday afternoon shows.
I did not love this movie, but I did love that it was so weird and uninterested in adhering to the Marvel formula. It reminded me more of David Lynch’s Dune, for better or for worse, than the new Dune.
Agreed, for better AND for worsebut not to the same degree…there was vision, but an essential blandness to the proceedings here…there was deviation from the marvel formula but nothing nuts like the space navigators in Dune or the Baron
It’ll be interesting to see how Spider-Man, a guaranteed hit even more so than other Marvel properties, does…especially considering that thanks to the weird rights issue, Spider-Man movies don’t stream on D+ so no one will be able to say “eh, I’ll wait two months”
wonder what the general consensus (if there is one) among mcu fans is for this. i personally didn’t care for it. i found the characters really bland, the stakes way too giant and abstract for me to care about and so many scenes felt like long info dumps. not enough action, either. there were some interesting decisions, but they’re more interesting to discuss than they were in practice in the movie.also, for all the discussion about zhao using real locations, i thought more often than not everyone looked quite silly in their superhero costumes in real environments. maybe there is something to the heightened digital environments after all.i don’t think it was bad necessarily, and if this was 15-20 years ago i’d probably have loved it, but it just didn’t do it for me.
It was a weird watch for me, since the only characters I knew from the comics were Dane Whitman and Sersi (…and that character the boy-bander played in the post credits scene). I still don’t know how the various characters and their back-story varies from the source material…since the rest of the Eternals are barely a footnote in the 616.On it’s own merits, I think the film was okay. It had a fun twist to the characters “purpose,” and I enjoyed the humor between Kumail’s character and his personal assistant / videographer. On the other hand, emo mind-control guy….and Bryan Tyree Henry’s power does not translate well to film. As someone who read Avengers in the 90s, I still feel like Angelina Jolie should have been Sersi; instead, they just gave her the ‘crazies’ aspect of that character arc.Not eager for the sequel, since most of the characters I liked from the first one got abducted before the film ended.
I read some of the Kirby comics and a lot of your criticism apply to it as well. There was a lot of work on developing a concept but not enough on characterization.
I liked it but didn’t love it. The biggest problem is that 10 characters and their various relationships and conflicts is a lot to introduce in a single movie. Eternals would have worked better as a D+ series.
They could have swapped it out with Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which I think would have worked better as a movie.
I’ve had the same thought.
I found it to be a mixed bag. I’ll be curious to check it out again on D+ now that I have the movie’s framework in my head. In a moment where Marvel is pivoting to TV, I weirdly think this would’ve worked better as a series instead of a feature.Good things:
Give me more Druig and Makkari! They were cute! Also the strongest Eternal, Gilgamesh, taking emotional care of Thena was great.Largely unconnected to the MCU besides a few throwaway linesThe celestials look way less goofy than I though they wouldI preferred the historic vignettes to the present day storyDiverse lead castBad/wtf things:The deviants sucked and the moment one of them got interesting, Thena offed him thus wasting story potential. Speaking of Thena, what a waste of Angelina Jolie’s talentsThe villain reveal was completely unnecessaryFor all the hype about real sets, a lot of this movie looked like it was shot on a soundstage. The jungle fight was inscrutable.Richard Madden & Gemma Chan are beautiful, charismatic actors and yet this movie seemed intent on making them as boring as possibleKingo just peaced out of the entire climax of the movie for… reasons?? I thought the Hiroshima thing was going to be twitter taking things out of context and making things seem worse than it was but nope, that was kinda bad
yeah the kingo thing in particular is what i found – interesting – but not necessarily good. like, on paper it’s neat that a character just decides to not participate in the climactic fight…but in execution, as an audience member, it’s weird and makes you feel like the time with that character was wasted.jolie seemed like she was on xanax the whole time and it was SOO funny when there would be crowd scenes and her character would conveniently be out of frame and then cut to one insert of her standing by herself nodding. this is also nitpicking but my buddy and i thought it was funny that the alien robot used the same ASL sign for ‘time’ as we do now, which is sort of mimicking pointing to a wristwatch, which is something that would not exist in most of the time periods the movie is set.
“my buddy and i thought it was funny that the alien robot used the same ASL sign for ‘time’ as we do now, which is sort of mimicking pointing to a wristwatch, which is something that would not exist in most of the time periods the movie is set.”You’re not wrong, but once you start with that, you wonder how it is that these 10 aliens are all speaking in about 8 different accents, none of which existed during most of history. So…just don’t.
I think there were hints of potentially fun things for Gemma Chan to do, but it seemed like they leaned a little too far into an offscreen epic romance or making her a compassionate god type— when there were so many other throughlines that would have been fun if they just spent a smidgen more time. If she let it go to her head and she spent a century creating the idea of Guanyin and getting worshipped as a goddess, further being goofily addicted to technology/an internet socialite (that’d be a cute callback to the comics too), thriving as a docent because of her lived experiences through those actual time periods, or even if she were more of a hapless nerd who started off only being able to turn small pebbles into other things (I thought it was a cute beat when she and Ikaris fought over who would pretend to read the upside down coloring book).And it was a cool visual but it really muddied things when they established she could only impact non-living things and then she constantly turned objects into rose petals or possibly living butterflies. It’s a weird choice to have a flashy display of powers then try to convince the audience the character is considered the weakest one and unfit for leadership.It is wild to me that apparently the Druig and Makkari relationship was improv’d by the actors since they managed to sell the pairing without getting all that much screentime individually nor together.
“We’re not so different, you and I. We were created by the same people to fulfill the same purpose! What makes you so much better than u…”[Slices him in half]“Well, we won’t be discussing that anymore!”
I was surprised at how bad it was. Easily the worst MCU for all the reasons you mentioned and more.
Two and a half hours, way too many characters, the name Eternals was apt. Great twists, though (all like 16 of them) and looked good. I’m not sure if the Celestial at the Centre of the Earth being the same basic plan as Ego is either inspired (that Ego would distort the Celestial creation process because he’s just that much Ego) or just lazy writing. (Meanwhile, Spider-Man No Way Home is two and a half hours and I already got my tix and zero problems with that, pour it all into my eyeballs!)
Eternals could have been 3 pretty good movies if Disney had let the concepts breathe.
Maybe my expectations were tempered somewhat but…I really liked it. I thought it did just enough to make the ensemble feel whole, but also diverse (in more ways than one). I thought the central conflict was compelling, both for its own sake, and in what kind of role it might play in the MCU going forward. And it had some impressive visuals, no doubt.Also: Gemma Chan needs to be in more things.
I enjoyed it for the most part, though my biggest (but not only) complaint about it is that it establishes all these big cosmic stakes implying some gonzo weirdness down the line… that’s all still mostly resolved with a video game boss fight on the beach. That said, I think the Rotten Tomatoes score and critical backlash is entirely based on expectations, because I can’t imagine a universe where this is worse than Thor 2.
It’s funny you say that, because your description of the movie is more or less the description I heard of The Eternals in comics prior to the film release.So, great job staying true to the source material, I guess?
haha yeah i guess above all it was authentic, i’ll give it that.
I saw it in the theatre and liked it enough to see it when it shows up on Disney+. It wasn’t the best MCU movie but it tried (and often succeeded) to do some stuff the MCU hasn’t yet done. I really hope there’s a sequel because those end credit stingers were fun…
Right now, it’s the 7th highest grossing movie of 2021 and its numbers are impressive by Covid standards. I suspect we’ll get some kind of additional follow up either a movie of a limited series.
Meanwhile, March’s Black Widow didn’t hit Disney+ for all subscribers until October 6, seven months after its release Black Widow was released in July.
Black Widow had its wide opening on July 9, not in March. It became available for non-premium streaming on Disney+ on October 6. That’s 3 months following its theatrical premiere, not 7.
Yeah, I don’t know how that error was made, since the sentence has both July and October in it.
I think they’re doing this shit on purpose now
Making up box office ground after three movies made $1.2 billion. Ok
Although I wouldn’t rank it among the top MCU movies, I enjoyed The Trolley Problem: The Movie.https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2021/11/06/hope-springs-for-marvels-eternals/
I think I’ll watch it again on D+? Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing but it just didn’t feel like a Marvel movie. Case in point, after seeing the Eternals, I went home and turned on the tv. Started channel surfing and found Winter Soldier on some channel. Started watching it and realized THAT’S what I want in a Marvel movie. And yet, if they were all the same it would be boring…I get it. But at the same time, this could be a problem for Marvel because I think there are a lot of people like me who didn’t read the comic books and am starting to lose interest in Marvel. If Eternals is the way forward, I’m not sure if I’m on board.
I enjoyed it, but I do think it and several of the current properties may seem “better” in retrospect in so much as there is a lot of table-setting that seems to be happening right now. Maybe that will never payoff, but I imagine that is the plan at least.
This was my favorite MCU film since Black Panther, just because it had a different vibe to it. Less quippy banter, a moral dilemma which actually feels earned instead of forced, heroic characters who truly feel the awful burden of their responsibility, and possibly the most sensitive and intelligent portrayal of a mentally ill character I’ve seen in a mainstream blockbuster (I realize that this is an incredibly low bar.) Man, I wanted to like Black Widow and Shang Chi so much more than I did, but in the end they just felt like they were going through the Marvel motions, with the only real spark of creativity to be found in a couple of Shang Chi’s fight scenes (the bus and the skyscraper.) Eternals was flawed, but at least it was trying something new. I’m so excited for the second one.