Eternals may go down in Marvel Studios’ history — but not for the reasons Kevin Feige would like.
Chloe Zhao’s history-spanning superhero extravaganza is currently sitting at 47% on the Tomatometer, by some distance the lowest score an MCU movie has ever received. It’s not exactly smashing it at the box office either: While by no means an outright failure, it’s struggling to match Shang Chi‘s performance from earlier this year, and is suffering big drops each weekend.
There’s no obvious single reason for that. You could point to a lackluster marketing campaign that primarily showed the characters standing in an overcast field, audiences paying attention to the bad reviews, the movie featuring characters obscure even to Marvel fans, too many characters to deal with or, simply, that audiences are getting mild superhero fatigue.
Producer Victoria Alonso has a different theory: critics are panning the movie because it’s too diverse. Speaking at the Outfest Legacy Awards, she made a rather snippy comment indicating that she thinks the critics just didn’t appreciate it:
We have tried to stir it up and sometimes the critics are not with us. That’s OK. That’s OK. We thank you for being a critic. We thank you for writing about us. And the fans will decide. Diversity and inclusion is not a political game for us. It is 100 percent a responsibility because you don’t get to have the global success that we have given the Walt Disney Company without the support of people around the world of every kind of human there is.
I’ve read a lot of Eternals reviews and didn’t see anyone arguing the film was bad because it was too inclusive. Indeed, one of the most commonly praised aspects — even in the negative reviews — was the LGBTQ+ elements. I’m sure the usual grimy corners of the internet are wailing that there are too many women in Eternals and so on, but then they say that about everything.
I don’t think Eternals poor critical, audience, and box office reception is anything to do with it being diverse and inclusive — it’s because it’s not a very good movie. End of story.
