‘Eternals’ Director Reveals Why the Movie Flopped

Chloé Zhao is opening up about why she believes Eternals performed poorly and was so “divisive” for fans and critics alike.

Zhao, who directed the 2021 MCU film Eternals, admits having too much at her fingertips allowed production to spiral out of control.

In an interview with Variety, Zhao revealed that unlike her upcoming new historical drama film Hamnet, which had a smaller budget and therefore more limitations to help main focus, Eternals came with too much “money and resources."

“Eternals had, like, an unlimited amount of money and resources. And here we have one street corner that we can afford, to [stand in for] Stratford ... Eternals didn’t have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous. Because we only have that street corner [in Hamnet], suddenly everything has meaning,” she said.

Another reason Zhao feels the film did poorly was due to its delayed theatrical release date.

“Eternals was planned to be released soon after Endgame, and not at a time when everyone is having an existential crisis [at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic]. The film itself is about existential crisis, both for humanity and God. So I think we definitely felt [the divisiveness] was coming,” she explained.

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That said, Zhao did expect from the beginning that there might be some push back to her unique vision for Eternals, which merged her more artsy, naturalistic, character-driven approach to filmmaking with Marvel’s big-budget spectacles.

“In this case, we truly stepped out of the box that I think the world put us in, and met in the middle because of our shared interests. And by truly doing that, it made a lot of people uncomfortable on both sides. But there are also people who are more comfortable with the order of their world [being] disturbed. And then they look at our love-child and go, ‘Oh! This touches different sides of me!’ I like that,” she shared.

“I completely understand the divisiveness coming from critics and the fans. Because when you take this to extremes that are seen as opposition — the world I come from and the world of Marvel, that has been divided in a way that’s so unfair and unfortunate — and to merge the way we did, I actually see the reaction as a testament to how much we had merged with each other; how uncomfortable that might make people feel,” Zhao added.

Zhao is best known for her work on independent films. In 2021, she won the Academy Award for Best Director for her 2020 film Nomadland. The film follows a widowed drifter (Frances McDormand) who leaves her home in Nevada following the Great Recession to travel the American West in her van.