Marvel's Eternals generated great excitement because an Oscar-winning independent filmmaker would adapt cosmic comic book mythology in a rare event. This new chapter of the MCU was expected to unlock emotional and philosophical development. However, the film failed to achieve box office success and critical acclaim, thus remaining fossilized under Chloé Zhao's incredible oeuvre.

Though Marvel was in no rush to make the movie, Zhao recently revealed how she found a penchant for the mythologically rich story and was adamant to bring it to life.

In a recent Awards Chatter podcast interview, director Chloé Zhao offered fresh insight into how the movie, Eternals, came about and why it was not exactly a top priority for the studio before she joined the project. The process of selecting Eternals' director kick-started when Marvel decided to work with Zhao since she initially pitched her vision while working on her Oscar-winning project, Nomadland.

Zhao said Eternals had artistic value for the studio, but it was not considered important because they saw it as a unique intellectual property that existed on their booming roster of potential projects. Her enthusiasm for the project, together with Kevin Feige's belief in her dedication, enabled progress toward Eternals' development. The leap of faith became possible for her because Feige told her he trusted her to handle the project because nobody else wanted it.

"Eternals was not high on their priority list. Because it’s a quite unique IP and it [was] only on their list of potential players," Zhao told Awards Chatter.

"I know that no one, no one, told you to make that film. Literally no one in the world was interested in it or told you to do it, but you wanted to do it," Zhao recalled Feige saying, during the interview.

Kevin Feige laid out the studio's priority list in front of her, thus rendering the movie more of a filmmaker-driven passion project than usual Marvel swashbuckling blockbusters. However, this was not her first brush with Marvel either.

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Marvel has the keenest eye for selecting the best, especially when it comes to filmmakers; hence, Zhao's first Marvel project might not have been Eternals at all, if it was not for the director's own insistence.

Chloé Zhao's Eternals experience highlights how the machine that Marvel is touted to be actually operates with an approach that prioritizes finding the perfect director to partner with their existing IPs, instead of starting with popular film projects. However, Zhao recalled that she was in the running to direct Black Widow before Eternals.

But the project never happened because the esteemed director chose to work on Nomadland. Zhao returned to her own filmmaking plans after her film Eternals received mixed reviews. This was primarily because the movie cashed in less than other MCU hits and became one of the most disputed films in the franchise. 

Zhao transformed Eternals into its final form because of her dedication to the project, whereas Marvel showed little interest in developing the IP, which she transformed into an innovative story that brought new philosophies and masterclass acting to the MCU. The MCU hiccup was the only one in recent times that Zhao faced as the next major film, Hamnet, followed her personal stories, which received critical acclaim outside the superhero genre and won her back-to-back awards.

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