By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | February 7, 2024 |
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | February 7, 2024 |
There have been worse MCU movies (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), and there have been movies more responsible for its ongoing collapse (Thor: Love and Thunder), but Eternals was the beginning of the end for Marvel.
It was the first Marvel movie where critics were finally able to say that not every MCU movie is great, and the reality is, Eternals wasn’t great. Not every great director, in this case Chloé Zhao, is well suited to the Marvel universe, and a big all-star cast by itself is not enough to sell a film (also, not for nothing, but if you have a great, diverse cast, don’t also cast the two white guys best known for their work as brothers on the same show, Game of Thrones, because that sh*t was confusing).
Indeed, Eternals fetched a 47 percent on Rotten Tomatoes when it was released, the worst-reviewed MCU film at the time, and the movie with what remains the second lowest box office ahead of only The Marvels (granted, COVID did not help). The reception for Kumail Nanjiani — who got jacked for the film — did not sit well, as he told Michael Rosenbaum on his podcast.
“Marvel thought that movie was going to be really, really well reviewed, so they lifted the embargo early and put it in some fancy movie festivals and they sent us on a big global tour to promote the movie right as the embargo lifted,” Nanjiani said on the podcast (Eternals premiered at the Rome Film Festival, and opened the Asian World Film Festival). “The reviews were bad, and I was too aware of it. I was reading every review and checking too much.”
That’s a hard place to be, and Nanjiani clearly internalized those reviews.
“I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie. It was really hard, and that was when I thought it was unfair to me and unfair to [my wife] Emily, and I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some shit has to change, so I started counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that.”“Emily says that I do have trauma from it. We actually just got dinner with somebody else from that movie and we were like, ‘That was tough, wasn’t it?’ and he’s like ‘Yeah, that was really tough,’ and I think we all went through something similar.”
There are still some Eternals apologists (ahem), but Nanjiani should not feel bad about the film’s reception. They are assembly line films, and he played his part well (Nanjiani was a rare bright spot in the film). There was certainly an anti-woke crowd that was particularly vicious with Eternals, but there was also a subset of critics who gave the film every benefit of the doubt because they wanted it to succeed in no small part because of our collective fondness for Nanjiani, of whom we are all still very fond. I hope his next film Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is better received. If it’s not, it certainly won’t be Nanjiani’s fault.
Source: Inside of You