In a profile in Rolling Stone on Eternals director Chloé Zhao, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige called her pitch for Eternals "the best he'd ever heard."
“Not only does Chloe make remarkable, small, personal movies in a remarkable, small, personal way, but she thinks in grand, cosmic, gigantic terms, which fit perfectly with what we wanted to do,” Feige told Rolling Stone. “Eternals is a very big, sweeping, multimillennial-spanning story. And she just got it.”
The Eternals are a race of immortal, godlike beings, created by the alien Celestials as a race of defenders of Earth, set in opposition to the malevolent Deviants. They were originally created in 1976 by the legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby, who'd returned to Marvel after several years' work at its competitor DC.
While the Eternals became somewhat less fashionable as time went on—they're very much a product of Marvel's "weird period" in the '70s, alongside other eccentric characters like Howard the Duck, Tigra, and Adam Warlock—they've remained a steady part of the Marvel Universe's background lore. One Eternal, the matter-manipulator Sersi, was a front-line member of the Avengers for several years in the '80s and '90s.
In Zhao's Eternals, the various immortal members of the species reportedly reunite after time spent apart, following the "Blip" and its reversal in Avengers: Endgame, in order to combat a threat from the Deviants. It features a particularly strong ensemble cast for a Marvel film, including Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Brian Tyree Henry, Kit Harington, Gemma Chan, and Kumail Nanjiani; Eternals will also be the first Marvel film to feature major deaf and gay characters. Inasmuch as the Eternals ever had a main character, it's the flying brick Ikaris, who is played in the film by Game of Thrones' Richard Madden.
Zhao was born in China, educated in London, finished high school in Los Angeles, and studied film production at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York. Her most recent film before Eternals, the 2020 road movie Nomadland starring Frances McDormand (Fargo), won awards at the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Nomadland is planned for a theatrical run in February, distributed by Searchlight Pictures. Notably, Zhao used the same camera rig on Eternals that she'd used on Nomadland, out of a hope that the final film would feel "grounded... like you're right there in this space with these characters."
Eternals, one of the first films in the MCU's "Phase 4," is currently scheduled for release on November 4, 2021.
Source: IGN