In April, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige mentioned that he was “actively beginning to have creative discussions about” the Eternals, a comic that Jack Kirby created in the ‘70s. At the time, in an uncharacteristically judgmental aside for The A.V. Club, we noted that it seemed odd for Marvel to pursue an Eternals movie when even dedicated comic book nerds don’t really care about them (they’re like a less important version of the Inhumans), but now it looks like Marvel is really serious about this Eternals business. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel Studios has hired writers Matthew and Ryan Firpo to put together a script for Eternals, which THR says will involve “Game Of Thrones-style cosmic powerplays.”
The basic concept of the Eternals is that the Celestials—an ancient race of enormous space people, a few of which have been glimpsed in the MCU—created two super-powered off-shoots of humanity called the Eternals, who are nearly immortal, and the Deviants, who are into freakier stuff than the average off-shoot of humanity. The exist in secret throughout history, choosing not to get involved in humanity’s business for whatever reason, and Marvel presumably hopes that Eternals will give it a chance to tell some weird, Kirby-inspired cosmic stories without necessarily needing to involve the Guardians Of The Galaxy or Thanos (though that purple bastard’s father was an Eternal).
As for the Firpos, they wrote a highly acclaimed spec script called Ruin about a former Nazi captain who hunts down and kills the members of his old squad. The script reached the top of the Black List in 2017, making it one of the hottest unproduced screenplays of that year. (We said some uncharacteristically judgmental things about it and the rest of that year’s Black List in a story back in December.)