Director Chloé Zhao Reveals the Marvel Movie She Was First Approached to Helm Before Taking on ETERNALS

Director Chloé Zhao made her mark on Marvel with the 2021 film Eternals. The film didn’t do well in the box office or with critics despite its stacked cast and ambitious storyline.

Some said she bit off more than she could chew, and that made sense as it was a very big story with a deeply rooted past and characters, but I still enjoyed it and hoped for the characters to return in the MCU. Maybe Zhao could have taken off with a smaller cast and established backstory? She almost did.

In a recent interview on The Ringer, Zhao discussed her time in the billion-dollar franchise and revealed that Eternals wasn’t the first film on the table when the studio approached her.

"I went in at first for Black Widow, and then there was a scheduling conflict. And then when Nate Moore, my producer for Eternals, showed me the treatment, I went, ‘Oh, wow. I get to have all these immortals, like a Greek play, to discuss humanity. And then I get to create monsters and space gods, right?’”

Looking back, Zhao believed that the job should’ve been daunting at first glance, but her approach was very much the opposite. “It probably should have scared me. I don’t know. I tend to jump before I know how to swim.”

Zhao explained that this world of immortals and monsters spoke to her a lot more than the backstory of Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff.

"For those 10 years when I was going around America and learning new ways of life and having a relationship with nature, there was something bubbling inside really intensely," the director added.

"The volcano reference erupted, and that was in the form of Eternals. Because Eternals, at its heart, is a story about a pantheon of gods having discussions about the nature of humanity.”

It’s too bad that aside from a storyline nod here and there, we haven’t been able to fully integrate these characters or their open-ended post-credits scenes into the MCU. Maybe someday.