Did Eternals Just Flatline the MCU? Also, a Secret Awesome Movie That Everybody Needs To See!
I want to start off by saying, good for Kevin Feige for taking chances. A lot of people give Marvel shit because they “play it safe.” I don’t think that’s true. I thought Thor Ragnarok was weird and different. Feige took a gigantic risk when he made a superhero movie with a 90% black cast. Even choices I didn’t like – a smart Hulk and a beer-gutted Thor – I must admit were huge bets.
And now comes Eternals, a movie with characters that have nothing to do with anything we’ve seen before in the MCU. Ten of them, to be exact. Instead of the fun swashbuckling nature that all the Marvel films exhibited before this, Eternals chooses to be slow, thoughtful, dare be it, meaningful. It is the biggest chance the MCU has taken yet.
And it is a complete failure.
The movie limped over the 70 million dollar mark this weekend but it’s now below 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the worst reviewed Marvel movie of all time, a percentage that ensures a huge second weekend box office drop.
I have not seen the film. I woke up on Saturday thinking I was going to go. But as the day went on, a thought kept creeping into my head. Do I *have* to see this? Will I feel like I’m missing anything if I *don’t* go see this? The answer was no.
That reality metastasized into a larger discussion about what we’re trying to do as screenwriters. Isn’t creating a movie that people *HAVE TO SEE* the whole point of screenwriting? Should that not be the bar we set for ourselves when we come up with an idea? Shouldn’t we be asking, “If this became a movie, would people *have* to see this?” If the answer is no, why write it?
Here are some movies that, as they came out, I knew that I *had* to see them: Inception, The Dark Knight, Spiderman: Homecoming, 1917, Rogue One, Force Awakens, Get Out, Joker, Us, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Deadpool, A Quiet Place, Halloween, The Hangover, Parasite, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Social Network.
Why would I have to see Eternals? What special unique thing that I can’t get anywhere else is Eternals bringing to the table?
The reality is, Kevin Feige finally left the blackjack table and played roulette. He took, quite possibly, the most indie filmmaker of the last decade and gave her the reins to a 200 million dollar Marvel movie. What he got in return was Supheroland, the most boring looking superhero movie ever made.
You have a director who likes to create wide artificially blocked frames that stress stillness instead of activity and combined that with a near impossible screenwriting task – introducing ten different protagonists with ten different storylines. A lot of people have asked me how to write ensemble pieces since they’ve become en vogue during the superhero era (Avengers, Fast and Furious, Etc.). You do it by introducing the characters in their own movies so you don’t have to spend 70% of your movie setting people up.
It takes a certain amount of hubris to believe something like this could’ve worked. It has literally everything going against it. I guess when you experience as much success as Kevin Feige, you start to believe you can do anything. Now that that’s been proven wrong, what are the consequences?
Because here’s the upcoming slate for Disney (not Sony) Marvel movies:
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (May 6, 2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (July 8, 2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (November 11, 2022)
The Marvels (February 17, 2023)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (May 5, 2023)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (July 28, 2023)
Where is the sure thing? The first Doctor Strange didn’t light the box office on fire so there’s no guarantee this one will do better. Black Panther no longer has the actor who played the title character. How can that not hurt the film? I have no idea what The Marvels are and I don’t think anyone else does either. And Ant-Man is the lowest performing franchise Marvel has. The two movies that should do well are Thor and Guardians. But I’d say even Guardians is in trouble since the second movie was weak and James Gunn’s Suicide Squad turned out to be a dud. Throw in a post-pandemic box office lull and Marvel could be in serious trouble moving forward.
Should this be the beginning of the end of Marvel’s incredible run, people will look back at Eternals as the movie that started the slide.
Bummed out that I no longer had a movie to watch, I cycled through a few backup options. I started watching Finch on Apple TV and it wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t good either. The best way to describe it is that it was a 1990s Tom Hanks movie… without good directing or good writing. It had all the ingredients for one of those monster box office Hanks hits – Hanks doing a one-man show, his charm front and center, an impossible task with the highest of stakes. But the execution was so vanilla, you needed an industrial sized waffle cone just to make it through the first act.
So I went down my list and landed on a title several people have quietly been telling me to check out: The Empty Man. From what I understood, The Empty Man was a horror film that got lost in the mix once the pandemic showed up. It was dumped on HBO Max with barely a whisper. I looked it up on IMDB. Never heard of the director before. Never heard of the writer before. How good could it be?
Try the best horror film since A Quiet Place.
Wow was this movie good!
The film takes a very cliche horror premise – you call out to someone known as the Empty Man – and three days later, you kill yourself.
I challenge anyone to watch the opening of this movie and not get sucked in. It’s one of the creepiest – not to mention, heart pounding – 20 minutes you’ll watch all year.
But I’ll tell you when I knew this movie was special. You know how I always tell you: GIVE US SCENES WE HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE. Especially in horror. Give us scary scenes that are fresh. That are new. If all you’re doing is recycling old scares, why would we give two shits about your script?
Well, The Empty Man has one of the scariest scenes I’ve ever seen. And a big reason for that is because it’s so original. Our main character, an ex-detective looking into the death of a friend’s daughter, follows a series of clues that leads him out to a remote farm where a cult is practicing all sorts of weird cult stuff. It’s night time. He’s safely tucked away in a forest, a stream between him and the cult, who are a good half-mile away, performing a ritual where 100 shaved-head members are jogging around a bonfire.
It’s a weird moment but there’s nothing overtly scary about it. Then the bonfire goes out. Total darkness. We can’t see anything for an extended moment. Our hero stands there, behind a tree, in silence, waiting. Then, just across the stream, the moonlight illuminating the tops of their shaved heads, he sees all 100 cult members, facing him.
Instead of being half a mile away, they’re now about 200 feet away. They don’t move. They don’t make a noise. For all he knows, they don’t see him.
He then takes a step back. As soon as he does this, they take a step forward. Silence again. He takes a second step back. They all take another step forward, their feet uniformly clomping down in a loud “thump.” The brilliance of the scene occurs in between the action. The director isn’t afraid to sit there in silence for what seems like days. Everybody still. Everybody silent. Everybody waiting for the next move.
Finally our hero turns around and runs. And all 100 cult members sprint after him.
I’ve never seen a scene like this in a horror movie in my life. Do you know how difficult that is to do? To create a truly original horror moment? It’s nearly impossible. You’re competing against millions of horror scenes. So when someone puts the work in to find that original scene, I know I’m watching something special.
And this director is definitely special. He’s Ari Aster but he actually understands screenwriting. One of the great things about this script is the mythology. The backstory for the empty man is so extensive, so weird, so layered, that you almost feel like you’re in a philosophy class. You’ve constantly learning things you’ve never even fathomed before. It’s so unique. I can’t stop thinking about it.
I understand why this movie got dumped. It’s got nobody you’ve ever heard of in it. It’s got a first time director. The studio needed to cut costs somewhere during the pandemic and spending a bunch of money to promote a movie that didn’t have anybody in it or making it that they could market was an easy decision. But dude, Warner Brothers. You had an all-timer on your hands here. This is an amazing movie. I hope enough people are able to find it. It’s one of the best horror movies of the last decade.
Quick final announcement. I came across an excellent drama script during a consultation that I’m going to review on Wednesday. Nobody in town knows anything about this script so it’s making its debut here. The writer is one of the best dialogue writers I’ve encountered in years. And, best of all, they’re allowing me to post the script. So you’ll get to read it yourself. We haven’t highlighted dialogue for a while on Scriptshadow. But this review is going to be all about dialogue. So make sure to tune in!
