A star-studded ensemble cast featuring Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kit Harrington and a newly-ripped Kumail Nanjiani couldn’t keep Eternals from earning the lowest-rated score ever recorded for a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie on Rotten Tomatoes.
Complex reports that new superhero flick holds a 61 percent on the review aggregate site based on 103 critics. While that’s still a fresh score—60 percent is the cutoff—it still snatched away Thor: The Dark World’s title as the MCU’s previous lowest scoring movie on RT.
Other lukewarm titles from the comic book-born movie studio include 2008’s The Incredible Hulk (67 percent), 2010’s Iron Man 2 (72 percent), and 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron (76 percent).
Meanwhile, 2018’s Black Panther reigns as the best reviewed Marvel installment (96 percent), followed by 2018’s Avengers: Endgame (94 percent), 2008’s Iron Man (94 percent), and 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok (93 percent).
Eternals was helmed and written by Chloe Zhao, who won Best Director at the 2020 Academy Awards for Nomadland. Speaking to Fandango, Zhao detailed how she sought to inject environmental undertones into the story.
“I think by the end of the film, we will have a new understanding of planet Earth’s relationship with the cosmos, and also with her own inhabitants. But in that sense, it would have a huge effect on the future of the MCU.”
“The film is set after the Avengers brought back half of the population in the universe and on the planet. So, the way we look at an event like that is always, for us, it is seen as this huge ecological implication [if] something like that happened to our planet.”
Here is the official synopsis from Marvel:
Marvel Studios’ Eternals features an exciting new team of Super Heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, ancient aliens who have been living on Earth in secret for thousands of years. Following the events of Avengers: Endgame, an unexpected tragedy forces them out of the shadows to reunite against mankind’s most ancient enemy, the Deviants.
Eternals arrives in theaters on November 5.