Eternals is the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be directed by a Best Director winner in Chloé Zhao, whose Nomadland also took home Best Picture. But despite her immense talent and a stacked cast, including Angelina Jolie, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry, Kit Harington, and Salma Hayek, the superhero film has set an unwanted record:
Eternals is the lowest-rated MCU movie on Rotten Tomatoes.
Eternals has a 63 percent Fresh rating, which is three percent lower than the previous bottom-feeder, Thor: The Dark World (66 percent). Other less-loved Marvel movies include The Incredible Hulk (67 percent), Iron Man 2 (72 percent), and Avengers: Age of Ultron (76 percent). Meanwhile, the top five goes Black Panther (96 percent) at number one, followed by Avengers: Endgame (94 percent), Iron Man (94 percent), Thor: Ragnarok (93 percent), and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (92 percent).
Eternals isn’t an outright critical disaster, the way 2016’s maddening Suicide Squad was for DC, and even the harshest reviews have nice things to say about Zhao making the film “as pictorially beautiful as any movie in the franchise.” (It’s still expected to make bank at the box office.) But as our own Vince Mancini wrote, “It feels like they aren’t really trying to get us, the audience, to engage with any of these characters on a serious emotional level. They’re simply trying to build a massive playground in which these pieces of IP can continue to interact with one another accumulating maximum value.”
Eternals opens on November 5.