The MCU Is Making the Same Mistake With Eternals That It Made With The Incredible Hulk

Marvel Studios has found its new black sheep of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A label that was once attached to The Incredible Hulk now feels more at home with 2021’s Eternals, and that’s a major problem.

The Incredible Hulk was once known as the MCU’s black sheep within the fandom for Marvel Studios’ failure to acknowledge the movie and bring back any of its characters outside of the titular Green Goliath. It wasn’t until 2016, eight years after The Incredible Hulk’s release, that Marvel finally began reincorporating the Phase 1 movie into the MCU, beginning with Will Hurt’s Thaddeus Ross in Captain America: Civil War.

The fans loved Thaddeus Ross’ long-awaited return in Civil War, and so did Marvel, as Hurt was brought back for Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and Black Widow. Following his death, Marvel even recast the role with Harrison Ford for Captain America: Brave New World, which, for all intensive purposes, is the Hulk sequel fans had been waiting almost 20 years for.

The Incredible Hulk villain Abomination was then featured in Shang-Chi and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, while Betty Ross and the Leader returned in Brave New World. These last three role reprisals came more than a decade after their first appearances, and were seen as long overdue returns that failed to live up to the expectations fans had built up for them in the intervening years.

The Eternals and Black Knight are too important to be left behind in the MCU

It’s been five years since Eternals was released and none of the characters that debuted in the movie have been seen again in the MCU. Like The Incredible Hulk, Eternals was seen as a misfire for Marvel Studios, which explains why the company has made zero effort to continue any of the movie’s narrative threads, outside of Celestial Island in Brave New World.

Unfortunately, Marvel has forgotten that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Eternals may have “flopped” like The Incredible Hulk, but the MCU as a whole is still successful. Instead of letting these characters collect dust for a decade, Marvel should be populating them in other projects, like they eventually did with The Incredible Hulk’s cast. This will give them wider recognition among more casual MCU viewers.

The biggest opportunity for Marvel to introduce these characters to a wider audience would be in Avengers: Doomsday or Secret Wars. However, Marvel would rather bring back 20th Century Fox’s X-Men cast for the umpteenth time instead of using characters that could actually benefit from appearing in arguably the biggest movie of 2026.

Of course, the biggest casualty in Marvel’s abandonment of Eternals has to be Kit Harington’s Dane Whitman/Black Knight. The actor recently implied that Marvel has no plans to bring the character back, a decision on par with Red Hulk debuting in a Captain America movie.

If Marvel got cold feet on a Black Knight solo project, the least the studio could do is move the character into another hero’s movie. Hulk and Black Widow went a decade without solo movies, yet their character arcs continued to progress thanks to appearances in Captain America, Thor, and Avengers movies. As the MCU expands its supernatural corner with Ghost Rider (and possibly Midnight Sons), leaving Black Knight behind is the ultimate head-scratcher.

The Eternals and Black Knight have some major stars behind them, and it would be foolish to keep them out of the MCU for another decade. If Marvel doesn’t act now, any interest in these characters that might exist will be long gone by the time the studio does decide to use them.

Source: Comingsoon.net