Remember Eternals? It was supposed to be the classy Marvel movie. Its director, Chloe Zhao, had recently won a Best Director Oscar for a movie that won Best Picture. It had a fancy non-linear structure. It had the MCU’s first gay superhero. And yet when it came out it had the worst Rotten Tomatoes score of the franchise. (Currently that honor goes to Ant-Man 3.) It wasn’t a box office bomb, but it was an early sign that Marvel’s reign was on the wane. Eternals‘ relative failure even so got to one of its stars that he sought help.
Per Entertainment Weekly, Kumail Nanjiani — who got ripped to play Eternals member Kingo Sunen — went on the podcast Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum. There he reflected on what he was assured would be a “slam dunk,” and how he handled things when it wasn’t. Indeed, when the reviews came out, he said, “that was very, very tough for me and I realized that too much of how I’m evaluating what I want to do is based on the result of what other people think of it.”
Making it worse was all the hype surrounding it pre-release.
“It was really, really hard because Marvel thought that movie was going to be really, really well reviewed,” he recalled, “and so they lifted the embargo really early and they also put it in some fancy movie festivals and they sent us on a big global tour promoting the movie right as the embargo lifted.”
Nanjiani remembered having to “travel the world while they thought we’d be going on a wave of raves and it wasn’t true. The reviews were really bad.” Najiani didn’t shield him from the bad press. Instead he found himself “reading every review.” That wasn’t good for his mental health.
“I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie,” he argued. “It was really hard, and that was when I thought it was unfair to me and unfair to [my wife] Emily, and I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some sh*t has to change, so I started counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that.”
Was the critical reaction that bad? Eternals might have scored a rotten, but a lot of the review (including Uproxx‘s) praised the ambition, the swings at the fences, the way they all tried to make a different Marvel movie — even if it was ultimately deemed unsuccessful. Nanjiani himself also got decent notices. But when you’ve been convinced that you’ve got a game-changing smash on your hands, one that will wow audiences and critics alike, and that decidedly does not happen, yes, that must stink.
You can watch Nanjiani’s full appearance in the video below. The Eternals business begins around the 23-minute mark.
(Via EW)