Eternals director Chloé Zhao has said that Marvel giving her an “unlimited” budget limited her creatively and ultimately turned out to be “quite dangerous”.
Eternals, which was released in 2021, introduced a new set of characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – a race of immortal beings with superhuman powers who have secretly lived on Earth for thousands of years.
Starring Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Brian Tyree Henry, Kumail Nanjiani, and Barry Keoghan, Eternals was panned both critically and commercially. The film was made on a $236.2m budget, but ended up making $402.1m worldwide at the box office and has one of the lowest ratings compared to other Marvel properties on the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
In a new interview, Zhao explains how working on the superhero film prepared her for her latest feature Hamnet, and why she felt that the financial freedom stifled her.
“Eternals prepared me for Hamnet because it’s world-building. 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,” Zhao told Vanity Fair.
“Eternals had, like, an unlimited amount of money and resources. And [for Hamnet] we have one street corner that we can afford, to [stand in for] Stratford. Eternals didn’t have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous. Because we only have that street corner [in Hamnet], suddenly everything has meaning.”
In The Independent’s three-star review of the film, critic Clarisse Loughrey praised Zhao for the emotional maturity expressed throughout, but questioned if big studios like Marvel would let directors take risks.
She wrote: “Despite its characters explicitly tussling with their own lack of humanity, Zhao has delivered one of the most emotionally grounded entries in the entire franchise. She puts into full view the kind of moral quandaries that Marvel’s only ever really danced around in the past – the cost of individual life, or whether humanity is even worth saving in the first place.”
While there were initial plans for Eternals to get a sequel, Marvel boss Kevin Feige revealed in 2024 that there were “no immediate plans for Eternals 2”.
Zhao’s forthcoming feature Hamnet, is the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, which she directed and co-wrote the screenplay for with O'Farrell.
Starring Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as the playwright’s wife Agnes Shakespeare, the film follows their life as the couple struggles with the aftermath of the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet.
Filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes produced the film, whose presence Zhao said helped her while making Hamnet.
“Their feedback was very filmmaker-driven because they’re both incredible filmmakers, so when they gave me notes, they were already infused with what they knew was my style,” she said. “Even when I did things that probably were confusing or didn’t make sense to people, they would say, ‘You know what? We trust her. Let her do her thing.’”
Hamnet is set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September before it is released in theaters on 27 November.
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