Chloé Zhao teases Eternals’ original bummer ending
The Oscar-winning filmmaker originally took audiences to a trip to The Twilight Zone
This article discusses the plot of Eternals
Chloé Zhao’s Eternals lives with Zack Snyder’s Justice League as one of the year’s most divisive superhero movies. Pushing bladders to the brink, the two-and-a-half-hour-long Eternals almost left audiences with a sour taste in their mouths. In a new interview with Empire, Zhao hints at just how “bleak” her original ending was before she corrected it in the edit.
“We actually had another ending that is really bleak,” Zhao told Empire. “I didn’t hate it, because I’m used to films that are more melancholy. But I don’t think it went down well with audiences.”
Zhao says that she pulled the ending back from the brink of a full-on existential breakdown because audiences want to leave superhero movies somewhat optimistic about the future—well, future installments of the MCU.
“It used to end with everybody back on the ship, minds erased, and just going on to another planet, like The Twilight Zone. I remember when it goes to black, everyone was like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ And also, it’s the MCU, and you want to be excited for what’s next.”
Finding the ending during the editing process is all part of the process, says Zhao, and one that she’s relied on for her other work. “I have never made a film where the ending is what I wrote! You find it in the edit,” she said. “Editing is a third of the filmmaking process, and when you show it to people, that’s when you find the ending. I don’t think I’ve made a single film where the opening and ending stay the same as the script, just because the scenes are fluid as we shoot.”
Eternals’ Oscar-winning pedigree didn’t earn the movie an automatic favor with critics. The A.V. Club’s film editor A.A. Dowd called it “just another Marvel movie.” He continues:
Eternals proves, maybe once and for all, that who’s behind the camera of these quality-controlled blockbusters may not matter so much. What’s the difference in shooting a real landscape and just generating one on a laptop if it’s going to serve as wallpaper for another round of visually undistinguished comic-book combat? As an action movie, Marvel’s latest offers more of the weightless digital same: variably convincing avatars of the actors darting across ashen beachfronts, tossing fireballs and tendrils.
Despite the middling reviews from us and other publications, audiences turned out for Eternals. The movie didn’t make Spider-Man money, making it a “bomb” in the Marvel sense of the term—if earning $400 million could ever be considered a failure.
Nevertheless, the ending would always feature Eros, Thanos’ dreamy brother, played by Harry Styles. Surely Harry and his jawline would’ve cheered audiences up after enduring Zhao’s original ending, right?