Eternals will introduce a whole new group of heroes into the MCU this November, though our first experience with their kind wasn’t exactly positive. That’s because the first Eternal we officially met was none other than Thanos, who violently conquered many planets and dusted half of all life in the universe.
In the comics, the Mad Titan is the son of Eternals Mentor and Sui-San, with Deviant Syndrome giving him his sinister appearance and purple skin. Neither Infinity War nor Endgame explicitly delved into Thanos’ childhood, but we did get to see his homeworld of Titan, which he described as once being beautiful but overpopulated and facing extinction, causing him to devise his deadly solution to the problem.
Titan seemed to be a distant planet with its own moon and it being a long way away from Earth was underlined by the time Tony Stark and Nebula spent drifting in space prior to being rescued by Captain Marvel. But Marvel’s Avengers Station exhibition in Las Vegas may be retconning this.
The display on Thanos claims that he was born within our own solar system on the Saturnian moon of Titan and that he’s “the last of an ancient and highly sophisticated species known throughout the universe as The Eternals.” This is in line with his comic origins, though the MCU version originating on a moon of Saturn might just be a case of crossed wires somewhere in the marketing department after someone searched for information on Titan.
Despite that, it at least seems certain that Eternals will reference Thanos as being one of the titular race. There’ve been fan theories that it’s his appearance on Earth that caused the Eternals to emerge from seclusion and engage with the world, but we’ll find out what’s really going on when November 5th rolls around.