Back in 2015, it was announced that 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley was developing a Marvel TV show for ABC. However, by 2019 the project was cancelled as a result of Marvel Television being folded into Marvel Studios. Five years later, Ridley has revealed that he was working on a TV show based on The Eternals, and in the process he threw some shade at the Eternals move released in 2021.
Ridley stopped by ComicBookClub to talk about his new comic book series The Ministry of Compliance, and towards the end of the interview, he shared that he’d been hired to write “a television of The Eternals.” Keep in mind, the Eternals movie wasn’t officially announced until 2018, so it’s not as though there were two different adaptations on these Jack Kirby-created characters in development at the same time. The writer continued:
My version was the good version. 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 we ended up doing, which I don’t think… that version was particularly good. I’ll be honest, and for all kinds of reason.
Eternals is certainly one of the more critically-mixed offerings of the Marvel movies in order, with our own Mike Reyes giving it three out of five stars in his review. So now we can count John Ridley among the people who didn’t care for the Chloé Zhao-helmed flick, which starred actors like Richard Madden, Gemma Chan, Angelina Jolie and Brian Tyree Henry. Additionally, Eternals was the lowest-grossing Marvel movie until The Marvels came along last November, and as things currently stand, it’s unclear if Eternals 2 will be made.
All this being said, Ridley quickly made it clear that his TV version of The Eternals wasn’t going to be anything like the movie. Instead, he apparently was going to put a Legion-like twist on the property, as indicated by the following way he described the pilot:
My version started with, the first thing you see is a young man, probably about 17 or 18 years old. 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.
As bizarre as this premise sounds, perhaps these characters who’ve been living among humanity for thousands of years would have better served in a TV setting, where they could be explored across numerous seasons rather than just a movie or two. In fact, I’ll go a step further and say Eternals and Inhumans should have been flip-flopped. The Inhumans series that aired in 2017 was critically-panned, and originally the Terrigen Mist-empowered characters were supposed to star in a movie set for release in 2019. If the original plans for both these properties have stayed intact, perhaps they would have ended up being hits with the public.
On the other hand, John Ridley later admitted that this Eternals show was “really hard property to develop,” and that the “best thing to happen for everybody” was that it didn’t happen with him because he “wasn’t the right person” for it. He also acknowledged that what’s often entertaining for him is “often not populist,” his take on The Eternals needed to be a “little bit more popular,” and ultimately it just didn’t work out. So file this to the pile of Marvel TV shows that never saw the light of day, which also includes the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spinoff Marvel’s Most Wanted and New Warriors (both of which shot pilots), as well as the Gabriel Luna-led Ghost Rider, which would have aired to Hulu subscribers.
Nowadays if you’re looking to get a Marvel TV fix, you’ll need a Disney+ subscription to keep up with what’s happening in the small screen corners of the MCU. Be sure to also keep visiting CinemaBlend for updates on the upcoming Marvel TV shows still on the way.
