Kumail Nanjiani ‘shattered’ by Eternals’ reception after signing on for 6 movies

Marvel’s Eternals came out in 2021. Non-Marvel fans may remember it as the movie that Kamail Nanjiani got super buff for. It was a part of the MCU’s Phase 4, which kicked off with Black Widow and continued with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Marvel was really feeling itself during this time period because all four of these movies and five television series were released in 2021, with three more movies and three more series coming out in 2022. It was the beginning of Marvel Fatigue.

In addition to Nanjiani, Eternals had a huge cast full of well-known actors like Angelina Jolie, Gemma Chan, and Kit Harington. The only Eternals tie-in we’ve gotten in the 11 movies that have followed it was a plot point in Captain America: Brave New World, with no Eternals appearances. The movie has been basically abandoned, which is interesting because according to Kumail, there were big plans for the Eternals characters, but in the aftermath of its poor reception, everything got scrapped. He signed on for six movies and was really excited about entering his Marvel Era. When none of it came to fruition, he was left “shattered.”

It took until this year for Captain America: Brave New World to finally address the half-risen Celestial in the room, but that’s honestly the closest the MCU has come to acknowledging the events of Eternals. It’s hardly a surprise, really. In the post-Avengers: Endgame era, the movie was the first major misfire from Marvel Studios that, according to one of its stars, had a whole blueprint mapped out that never came to fruition.

During an appearance on the Working It Out podcast, Nanjiani revealed just how much he’d committed to before the film’s release, and the shock he experienced when it didn’t receive the warm welcome like the other MCU movies that predated it. “It came out, it got really bad reviews, and it didn’t do that well. It shattered me too much,” the actor who played Kingo confessed. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, I need to go to therapy to figure this out.’”

The film earned one of the worst scores on Rotten Tomatoes at 47%, etching ahead of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania which sits at the bottom of the pile. For Nanjiani, it wasn’t what he expected at all. “I was like, ‘This is going to be my job for the next ten years.’ I signed on for six movies. I signed on for a video game. I signed on for a theme park ride. They make you sign on for all this stuff. You’re like, ‘Okay, so I’ll be doing Marvel movies every year, and in between, I’ll do my own little things. Whatever I want to do.’”

[From Games Radar]

Kumail has been pretty open about how devastated he was after Eternals failed to go anywhere. I think he’s a real-life super hero for putting it out there that he was so disappointed about the professional failure that he went into therapy. I’ve always appreciated his honesty and felt badly about how he got a raw deal. Up until that point, every Marvel movie had led to multiple opportunities to reappear in different ways within the franchise. It’s not his fault, though. Eternals was fine, but it was also too long with a lot of plot holes and too many storylines. I think the MCU burned bright and fast, and execs realized that they needed to cut costs, so eliminating a cast of people who automatically commanded a higher pay was probably a no-brainer for them.

Also, I recently rewatched Shang-Chi and it was just as much fun as I remembered. Simu Liu is a delight. While there are supposedly still plans for a second movie, nothing is concrete right now. Marvel really did do a huge disservice to the new characters it was trying to bring into the fold.

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