Marvel's worst-reviewed movie gives key lesson to director

Chloé Zhao, an Academy Award-winning director, helmed Eternals in 2021. However, the film became divisive among Marvel fans and underperformed at the box office.

This supposedly led the studio to focus on what worked for them in the past. To the filmmaker, the superhero movie provided a valuable lesson that she applied in her forthcoming film, Hamnet.

Though unlike Eternals, which was set in a fictional world, her upcoming flick is an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about William Shakespeare.

Despite being historical, Chloé still has a task to create a believable world. At there, she told Vanity Fair, “Eternals prepared me for Hamnet because it’s world-building.”

She noted her past work was based on real-world environments; however, the experience from Eternals gave key insight into the storytelling of fantasy or historical genres.

"Before that, I had only done films that existed in the real world. I also learned what to do and not to do – what’s realistic and what isn't," the director said.

Though the impact of the worst-reviewed movie in Marvel was not only on its director, Kumail Nanjiani, who starred as Kingo in Eternals, said he had to seek therapy.

“I talked about how I was in this big movie. It came out right after COVID, so I had a year and a half at home to just be like, ‘Oh, when this thing comes out!'” he said on Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast.

“But then it came out and it got really bad reviews and it didn’t do that well. It shattered me too much. That’s when I was like, ‘Oh I need to go to therapy to figure this out," the actor continued.

Apart from being the worst-reviewed, Eternals bagged $402 million globally on a budget of $200 million.