It took until this year for Captain America: Brave New World to finally address the half-risen Celestial in the room, but that's honestly the closest the MCU has come to acknowledging the events of Eternals. It's hardly a surprise, really. In the post-Avengers: Endgame era, the movie was the first major misfire from Marvel Studios that, according to one of its stars, had a whole blueprint mapped out that never came to fruition.
During an appearance on the Working It Out podcast, Nanjiani revealed just how much he'd committed to before the film's release, and the shock he experienced when it didn't receive the warm welcome like the other MCU movies that predated it. "It came out, it got really bad reviews, and it didn't do that well. It shattered me too much," the actor who played Kingo confessed. "That was when I was like, 'Oh, I need to go to therapy to figure this out.'"
The film earned one of the worst scores on Rotten Tomatoes at 47%, etching ahead of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania which sits at the bottom of the pile. For Nanjiani, it wasn't what he expected at all. "I was like, 'This is going to be my job for the next ten years.' I signed on for six movies. I signed on for a video game. I signed on for a theme park ride. They make you sign on for all this stuff. You're like, 'Okay, so I'll be doing Marvel movies every year, and in between, I'll do my own little things. Whatever I want to do.'"
But while that to-do list never came to pass, Nanjiani's character Kingo has been one of the only Eternals that have either been referenced to or made blink-or-you-miss-it appearances in other MCU projects. Besides being name-dropped in the likes of Ms. Marvel and appearing on posters in the likes of Loki and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Kingo did appear in animated form, voiced by Nanjiani in What If…?
Even so, that's not quite what was initially offered, and while he still has a soft spot for the film, he only has the reviews to go off (we loved it by the way). "There were a few too many people in Eternals if the reviews are to be believed. I loved the movie. I'm very proud of it."
Nevertheless, some fans are still rooting for Kingo and his hero team, which perhaps revealed itself at the wrong time. For now, there's no telling if there's time for the Eternals to make an appearance in future chapters of the MCU, given that there's going to be a reality-tearing event on the way with Avengers: Doomsday. See where Eternals sits in our ranking of Marvel movies here.
