After the epic climax of the Infinity Saga with Avengers: Endgame, Phase 4 of the MCU is closing in, yet details of exactly what we can expect from the announced films have been a little thin on the ground. A new rumor coming through though is that the plot of The Eternals will feature the titular entities’ perpetual war with their evolutionary cousins the Deviants.
An unconfirmed piece of information leaked to Murphy’s Multiverse states that the plot of the movie will center around the “War of Evolution.” No further details were provided, but it does give credence to speculation that the story will see the two groups battle for the lives of humanity.
The Eternals are a race of immortal aliens created by the ancient and virtually omnipotent Celestials meddling with the genetics and evolution of proto-humans a million years in the past. Deviants, meanwhile, resulted as an offshoot of this process, worshipping an exiled Celestial as their creator and believing he afforded them the right to rule over the Earth and its people.
Aside from the Eternals themselves, only the Celestials have been mentioned as being featured in the film, with no word yet of the Deviants’ appearance. But given the contrasting and conflicting nature of the two races, it would be an odd choice if they didn’t appear.
Although the Eternals have yet to be even referenced in the MCU , the Celestials have briefly shown up on a couple of occasions, with Ego the Living Planet, Peter Quill’s father, being re-imagined as one of the race, while Knowhere, the base of operations of the Collector, is the skull of a dead Celestial decapitated eons previously by malevolent deity Knull.
It’s been confirmed that The Eternals will be the earliest film chronologically of the MCU, which aside from the prologue of Thor from a thousand years in the past, is currently the 1940s-set Captain America: The First Avenger. The spanning of vast swathes of time in a single story will add another aspect to the expanding cosmic scope of the movies’ universe, and if it’s to feature a war lasting on and off for tens of thousands of years, it may well prove to be the most ambitious installment yet.
