Eternals: Is the MCU Ignoring the Film’s Giant Ending? (2024)

Spoiler Warning: MCU's EternalsEdit: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law season 1, episode 2 included a nod to what is believed to be the Celestial with a headline reading "Why there is a giant statue of a man sticking out of the ocean?"

Eternals, what happened to it? It seems that the MCU’s Phase 4 has completely forgotten about its movie's massive consequences. Eternals introduced a brand-new group of superheroes to the MCU, and the film left planet Earth with a giant new appendage growing out of the ocean. Everything about the movie was ambitious. Eternals director Chloe Zhao’s impeccable choice in filming on location gave an element of realism to a film that would have otherwise happened on a green screen. And she did it while telling a story on a massive scale in one of the most ancient parts of the Marvel universe.

The Eternals are a group of manufactured immortal heroes endowed with the power of Celestials – ancient beings that regulate the cycle of life on a galactic scale. Though the heroes believed they were left on Earth to safeguard its sentient life, they were merely being used as caretakers to prepare that life for harvest. The Celestials would destroy humanity, and the rest of Earth, by birthing a new Celestial, which had been growing inside the planet, in a process called the Emergence. While the Eternals were able to prevent the giant space being from fully being born, his head and most of his right hand are now sticking out of the Indian Ocean, creating giant marble structures that must reach well into the stratosphere.

Along with adding this new group of heroes to the MCU, Eternals introduced one more newcomer and hinted at the return of an old favorite. But despite the huge consequences of this movie, no other MCU project in Phase 4 has even mentioned it.

Will the MCU Acknowledge the Emergence?

While the Emergence wasn’t as big of an event as the Blip, it is still a pretty big deal. We wouldn’t expect other titles to go out of their way to form plots around this giant statue popping out of the ocean, but we should have at least heard of it by now. None of the many MCU projects released since the movie have mentioned them, with one Eternals scene even being cut from Moon Knight. While the Avengers are really the nexus of the MCU, it sometimes becomes hard to isolate some of these other heroes.

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The Eternals do play an important role in the Marvel universe. Their enemies, the Deviants, are a relatively common threat worldwide and have been known to appear in other Marvel Comics titles. The Celestials, as well, are a very big deal. We’ve already seen them in several MCU projects before Eternals and, most recently, in Love and Thunder. They are a group of heroes that regularly deal with events on a larger scale but aren’t as popular or well-followed as the Avengers.

Popularity may be one reason for the MCU to try to brush this under the rug. The reaction to Eternals was underwhelming. It didn’t do well at the box office. It landed on the list of one of the worst performing Marvel movies putting it between Shang-Chi and Black Widow in domestic sales. Neither of those other movies had the planet-shaking consequences of Eternals. But Marvel will have to wonder if box office gross is what it takes to change its landscape, as Thor: Love and Thunder now comes in quite below all three of those films. But even with poor earnings, Eternals did reasonably well on Disney+.

It probably should have affected the other movies or made people aware of the Celestials. But we understand that Eternals is a stand-alone movie and shouldn't invade the plots of others.

The (Complicated) MCU Timeline

The MCU timeline can get a little confusing sometimes due to the Blip and the real-life pandemic that basically froze all movies for two years. Remember, Avengers: Endgame started right after Infinity War and jumped the MCU ahead by five years. So 2018 instantly became 2023 in MCU time. And when the world stopped in 2020 for Covid-19, Marvel’s release schedule also changed. So we have a lot of movies and TV series that were released not just out of chronological order in the MCU world but were also released off-time in the real world for Marvel to create a structured narrative.

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Chronologically, in MCU time, Eternals happened after Spider-Man: No Way Home and before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Doctor Strange occurs just before the Hawkeye series on Disney+, which is a good measuring stick to use because Hawkeye takes place near Christmas 2024. After that, in order, probably happening in 2025, we have Moon Knight, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, and Thor: Love and Thunder. So the MCU had plenty of opportunities to address a giant Celestial frozen in the ocean.

Understandably, Doctor Strange wouldn’t have seen it since he was busy traveling through universes. And Thor happened almost entirely off-world. But in a series like Hawkeye or Ms. Marvel that took place locally, it would have been very easy to slip in a news report on a background TV or a “have you heard” Easter egg in some dialogue.

As fans wait for confirmation, some wonder if Marvel will begin retconning its own movies into a strange limbo where some things happened, and some didn’t. And there are some fan theories for Eternals 2. All of us hope to see the Eternals again, standing next to our other favorite heroes, explaining how they destroyed a giant space being that almost ripped the Earth in half.