Scrapped Marvel Series About Eternals ‘A Good Version’

In another (Marvel) universe, the hot gods of The Eternals could have been your favorite television show. In a recent interview on the Comic Book Club podcast, John Ridley revealed that his shelved Marvel TV series he was developing at ABC was based on the 2021 MCU film.

While the project from nearly a decade ago was no longer in the works, the famed screenwriter and director mentioned that it was a “television version of The Eternals, but good.” Ridley, who won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 12 Years a Slave, described the pilot for his take on the The Eternals.

“My version was the good version,” Ridley said on the podcast. “It was so fucking weird. There was my version, a good version, which is good to me, which — that doesn’t mean anything. There was the version that [Marvel] ended up doing, which I don’t think… that version was particularly good. I’ll be honest.”

“My version started with… the first thing you see is a young man, probably about 18 years old,” Ridley continued. “And he’s sitting there. He’s sitting there for a moment. And then he lifts his hands. He has a drill in it. And he turns the drill on. And he puts the drill to his ear. And he starts pushing it in. And then it goes from there. That’s the start, right? That’s how it starts. And then I think you see… another kid… He sleeps in the bathtub, covers himself with foil. It’s just a really weird story about these people who are, I mean, it’s just weird.”

Although The Eternals was generally met with lackluster reviews at the time of its release, the writer-director said his interpretation was a “really hard property [to develop]” and that he doesn’t wasn’t sure if it “would have been entertaining” for everyone.

Ridley explained, “I do mean what’s entertaining to me is often not populist, which is great for a lot of the work I do, but this needed to be a little bit more popular, it really did.”