Several Marvel superheroes were discovered in the cinema, but could have had their own series six years earlier!
Back in 2015, when Marvel Television announced that author John Ridley was working on a secret, live-action Marvel series for the American channel ABC.
Known for his scripts for 12 Years A Slave or U Turn and as a writer, Ridley officially revealed on the podcast Comic Book Club what was the subject of the superhero series he was preparing at the time. Fans suspected it, he finally confirmed it: he was working on a Les Eternals series!
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By the way, what does Marvel mean?
My version is the correct one. She was really fucking weird. There was my version, a good version that satisfied me, but that doesn’t mean anything. I find that the version that [Marvel] ended up doing isn’t…this version wasn’t particularly good. I prefer to be honest.
Ridley takes a swipe at the film The Eternals by Chloé Zhao, released in 2021 and having only grossed $402 million at the box office (at a time when not all cinemas had reopened). Perhaps a series would have been needed to present all these characters rather than a feature film, even a 2h37 long one.
What was his idea?
“My version started with a vision of a young man, probably 18 years old, sitting for a little while. Then he raises his hands, which are holding a drill. He turns it to his ear and begins to push it. leaves from there. (…) That’s how it starts. Then I think you see another boy sleeping in his bathtub, covered in aluminum.”
But while this adaptation would have been very different from the film we eventually saw in theaters, Ridley admits that it may not have been easy to access, adding that “The best thing that happened is that [The Eternals] wasn’t done with me, because I don’t know if I would have managed to entertain [qui que ce soit]”because it is a “very difficult mark [à développer]”.
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Why it wasn’t the right time
Remember that this project was considered at a time when Marvel was actively developing a series on the Inhumans and had just started one on Agents of SHIELD. Suffice to say that this type of show did not benefit from a huge budget, neither for its costumes and sets, nor for its special effects.
If the Eternals series was that strange, and in a context where the budget would have been small, we could also imagine that it was perhaps too early to release such a project, which by definition required a lot of visual effects .
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In any case, the artistic and public failure of the Inhumans series nipped all Marvel Television / ABC projects in the bud, including this spin-off of Agents of SHIELD. The series arrived at Marvel several years later, in 2020, with WandaVision, to tell the continuation of the adventures of the Scarlet Witch played by Elizabeth Olsen post-Avengers: Endgame.