Chloé Zhao is reflecting on working on Marvel Studios‘ Eternals and how having a big budget ultimately proved “quite dangerous” in the end.
In a new interview to promote Hamnet, the filmmaker explained how the superhero movie prepared her for her latest film.
“Eternals prepared me for Hamnet because it’s world-building. Before that, I had only done films that existed in the real world. I also learned what to do and not to do—what’s realistic and what isn’t,” Zhao said in an interview with Vanity Fair.
She continued, “Eternals had, like, an unlimited amount of money and resources. And here we have one street corner that we can afford, to [stand in for] Stratford…. Eternals didn’t have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous. Because we only have that street corner [in Hamnet], suddenly everything has meaning.”
Although Eternals was not well-received by critics or Marvel fans, the film managed to gross $402 million at the worldwide box office in 2021. The film had an ensemble cast that included Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry, and Barry Keoghan, among others.
Nanjiani took on the role expecting to do more work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but reality quickly set in for him.
“It came out, it got really bad reviews, and it didn’t do that well. It shattered me too much,” he said on the Working It Out podcast. “That’s when I was like, ‘Oh, I need to go to therapy to figure this out.’”
He continued, “I was like, ‘This is going to be my job for the next ten years.’ I signed on for six movies. I signed on for a video game. I signed on for a theme park ride. They make you sign on for all this stuff. You’re like, ‘This is the next ten years of my life. Okay, so I’ll be doing Marvel movies every year, and in between, I’ll do my own little things. Whatever I want to do.’
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