Marvel Was Developing 'Eternals' TV Series Before Shifting Focus to Movie Version With Lukewarm Reception

The Marvel Cinematic Universe hit what was viewed as something of a stumbling block with the release of Eternals in 2021.

Starring the likes of Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek, the movie was not the sort of overwhelming blockbuster success that many other movies have been for the MCU.

Two years after the movie’s release, any plans for a sequel have been seemingly tabled for the moment. However, we are now learning about a different version of the story that almost made it to our TV screens.

Read more about the scrapped Eternals television series…

While on the Comic Book Club podcast, John Ridley revealed that he’d been tapped to develop a since-scrapped show based on the Eternals comics.

“It was a television version of The Eternals,” he said, via Variety. “But good. My version was the good version. It was so f-cking weird. There was my version, a good version, which is good to me, which — that doesn’t mean anything. There was the version that [Marvel] ended up doing, which I don’t think that version was particularly good. I’ll be honest.”

John explained that his story was “really weird.”

“My version started with…the first thing you see is a young man, probably about 18 years old. And he’s sitting there and then he lifts his hands. He has a drill in it. And he turns the drill on and he puts the drill to his ear and he starts pushing it in. And then it goes from there,” he recalled. “That’s the start, right? That’s how it starts. And then I think you see another kid…he sleeps in the bathtub, covers himself with foil.”

By the sounds of it, John doesn’t feel bad that it was scrapped. In fact, he described it as “the best thing to happen for everybody.”

“I don’t know that it would have been entertaining,” he admitted. “And I do mean what’s entertaining to me is often not entertaining. Populist, which is great for a lot of the work I do, but this needed to be a little bit more popular.”

The last time we got an update about a possible Eternals sequel was back in 2022.

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