Chloé Zhao says Eternals wasn't high on Marvel's priority list: "It [was] only on their list of potential players"

Eternals director Chloé Zhao has revealed that before she signed on to the 2021 superhero movie, it was not a big priority for Marvel Studios at the time.

"Eternals was not high on their priority list because it’s a quite unique IP and it [was] only on their list of potential players," admitted Zhao in an interview with The Playlist. "You know, with Marvel, it’s very much a thing to find the right filmmaker before they say, 'That’s the IP we’re gonna go for.'"

We can see how Eternals would be the bottom of the list at the time, with the studio coming out of the pandemic with no movies released in 2020, trying to best their massive 2019, which saw the release of Avengers: Endgame. However, tunes seemed to change once Zhao was on board, as the director recalls Marvel boss Kevin Feige trusting her because she expressed a passion for the project, telling her, "Literally no one in the world was interested in it or told you to do it, but you wanted to do it."

Eternals was very different from anything else Marvel was releasing at the time, and had themes of Greek mythology and warriors, which conflicted with the modern heroes we are used to seeing. The movie follows a group of ancient aliens who have been living on Earth in secret for thousands of years, but are pulled out of the shadows when an unexpected tragedy forces them to face their enemies, the Deviants.

But Eternals wasn't Zhao's first run-in with Marvel, as the director was once considered for Black Widow, which also hit screens in 2021. "Let me set the record straight. It doesn’t mean I had a job. I was in the running," she said. "But it didn’t feel like the right story for me, so I pulled myself out [of contention]." Almost four years on, Zhao is in the running for the Oscar for Best Director with her 2025 adaptation Hamnet, which received eight nominations in total.