Eternals Will Explain Why They Didn’t Stop Thanos

Marvel Cinematic Universe fans take the ins and outs of the mythology very seriously. Perhaps a little too seriously if you look at the widespread calls to cancel fictional and dead character Tony Stark when The Falcon and the Winter Soldier revealed that nobody paid the Avengers for saving the world on countless occasions—even if the genius billionaire playboy philanthropist kitted them out with their costumes and gave them a place to live.

Another bone of contention came when the first trailer for Chloe Zhao’s Eternals dropped at the end of May, with many longtime MCU supporters questioning why an all-powerful race of immortal aliens that had been living on Earth for millennia didn’t lift a finger to stop Thanos from wiping out half of all life in the universe. Especially when the Eternals are technically related to the Mad Titan in canon, why not prevent the Snap?

The obvious answer is because Eternals didn’t start shooting until after Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame had wrapped, but that simply won’t do for some sections of the fanbase. Luckily, a new feature on the movie vaguely details that Zhao’s cosmic epic will address the passive role the heroes played in the Snap, by revealing that “their mission is to focus on the Deviants and never interfere with human affairs”.

Every post-Endgame MCU project has addressed the Snap in one way or another, something that we can expect to continue in Eternals given both the references made to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in the trailer and the big purple elephant in the room that makes Josh Brolin’s Mad Titan a direct descendant of an Eternal or two—which is something that’s too important to the mythology as a whole to simply ignore.