EternalsSave

The film opens with a cosmic-scale prologue. The Celestials — vast star-sized beings that birth galaxies and sustain cosmic balance — created and dispatched the Eternals: a group of ten genetically engineered immortal warriors with unique individual abilities, sent to protect Earth from a parasitic species called the Deviants. The Eternals have been on Earth for over seven thousand years, watching humanity's development from Mesopotamia through the Industrial Revolution into the present, while quietly hunting Deviants in secret. Their leader is the immensely powerful Ajak, who serves as the team's direct connection to the Celestial Arishem. Cut to present-day London, where the Eternal warrior Sersi works as a museum curator and lives a quiet domestic life with another Eternal named Sprite (an eternal child) and her human boyfriend Dane Whitman.

A massive earthquake strikes London. From the rubble emerges a Deviant — except all Deviants were supposedly hunted to extinction five hundred years earlier. Sersi, Sprite, and Ikaris (Sersi's former lover, who can fly and project laser-energy from his eyes) defeat the creature. Concerned, Sersi tracks down the rest of the team across the world. They find Kingo, a Bollywood film star and pansexual showman; Phastos, an inventor and family man living quietly in Chicago; Druid, a melancholic emotion-controller working as a teacher in a remote Australian village; Makkari, a deaf super-speedster living aboard the still-orbiting team transport ship; Gilgamesh, a powerful warrior caring for an elderly Thena (a fierce sword-wielder suffering from a degenerative cosmic-mind condition called Mahd Wy'ry); and Ajak, who has been living on a small farm in South Dakota.

When the team arrives at Ajak's farm, they discover she has been killed by a Deviant. The kill grants the surviving members access to her cosmic-network communication. Ikaris claims he discovered her body first and presents himself as the team's new natural leader. The team begins reuniting and gradually piecing together a horrifying truth. The Deviants returning to Earth are not a coincidence. Their reactivation is a side effect of the Earth approaching the Emergence — the cosmic moment when the Celestial seed buried at Earth's core during the Eternals' arrival is ready to hatch into a new Celestial. The Emergence will rip Earth apart and kill all eight billion of its human inhabitants.

Sersi, the team's natural moral conscience, refuses to accept this. Ikaris reveals what he has known for centuries: the Eternals were never sent to protect humanity, they were sent to incubate the Celestial inside Earth's mantle. Their job all along has been to defend the planet from Deviants — not for humanity's sake, but to keep the Celestial's growing host body intact. Ikaris has known this since their arrival. He killed Ajak when she rebelled against the Emergence and tried to warn the team to stop it. The Eternals are essentially genocidal protocols, designed to prepare a planet for the harvest of a new cosmic god, after which the planet's population is sacrificed. Most of the team is horrified.

The Eternals split. Sersi, Sprite (who has secretly loved Ikaris for centuries), Phastos, Kingo, Druig, Makkari, Gilgamesh, and Thena form one faction determined to stop the Emergence. Ikaris, supported by Sprite (who chooses him over Sersi), forms the opposing faction determined to protect the Emergence and let humanity die so the Celestial can be born. The team battles itself in an extended sequence at the Amazon-rainforest hidden village where the rebel faction has fortified its position. Gilgamesh dies protecting Thena from a Deviant ambush. Druig captures Ikaris briefly with his emotion-control powers, but Ikaris breaks free.

The final confrontation takes place at the Emergence site itself — a remote Pacific volcano where the new Celestial's proto-form is breaking through the Earth's surface. The Eternals' last-resort plan is to use Sersi's matter-transmutation powers to convert the still-emerging Celestial into solid stone, freezing the Emergence indefinitely. To do this, Sersi must channel the cosmic-mental-network energy of every other Eternal through her body simultaneously. Ikaris arrives with Sprite to stop them. The team's battle on the volcanic shore is brutal. Phastos's inventor abilities create defensive constructs. Kingo refuses to fight either side and removes himself from the conflict. Sprite, faced with the choice between Ikaris and humanity, defects to Sersi at the last moment.

Sersi successfully channels the network and turns the emerging Celestial to stone. The proto-Celestial freezes in mid-emergence, its enormous head sticking out of the Pacific Ocean as a permanent geological feature. Earth is saved. Ikaris, having failed his cosmic mission and disgraced himself in his own eyes, flies into the sun to commit suicide. Sprite, realizing that her permanent child-form is the source of her isolation and pain, accepts Sersi's offer to convert her into a normal mortal human, granting her the chance to grow up and die a normal lifespan. The remaining Eternals reckon with the truth that they have been weapons of cosmic genocide for thousands of years across countless planets they had thought they had been saving.

Eternals grossed $402 million globally — a financial disappointment by Marvel's standards but a critically divisive picture. Director Chloé Zhao, fresh off her Best Director Oscar for Nomadland, brought a deliberately slower, more meditative pacing to the picture that some critics praised and others found ill-suited to a superhero ensemble. The film featured the MCU's first openly gay lead character (Phastos, with a husband and child shown on screen) and its first deaf lead (Makkari). The film's ending leaves the surviving team scattered across the cosmos: Arishem appears at the end and abducts Sersi, Phastos, and Kingo to face cosmic judgment, while Thena, Druig, and Makkari escape on the team transport ship to find other Eternals across the galaxy. The mid-credits scene introduces Pip the Troll and Eros (Thanos's brother, played by Harry Styles) arriving to recruit the surviving Eternals. The post-credits scene shows Dane Whitman receiving the Ebony Blade — establishing the Black Knight character — with a brief Mahershala Ali voice cameo as Blade. The Eternals have not yet returned to a subsequent film as of late 2025.

Zhao's commitment to natural-light cinematography, sweeping landscape compositions, and pastoral pacing gave Eternals a distinctive visual identity. Cinematographer Ben Davis worked closely with Zhao to shoot on location across multiple countries — Iceland, the Canary Islands, England — using golden-hour magic-hour photography that treated the Eternals as figures embedded in geological time rather than as conventional superhero ensemble characters. The film's ten-character ensemble made it the largest debut roster in MCU history, and several actors (particularly Gemma Chan as Sersi, Lauren Ridloff as Makkari, and Brian Tyree Henry as Phastos) gave performances that critics praised even when the picture as a whole was cooler reviewed.

The film's challenging cosmic-scale themes — questions about whether immortal beings have the right to intervene in mortal affairs, whether the species you were created to protect deserves to die so a god can be born, and how the Eternals reckon with their own complicity in millennia of cosmic genocide — were ambitious for a mainstream blockbuster. Zhao's screenplay (co-written with Patrick Burleigh and the team of Ryan Firpo and Kaz Firpo) deliberately resisted the standard Marvel Studios formula of clear villain confrontations and crowd-cheering payoffs. The result was a film that polarized audiences but earned a devoted following among viewers who responded to its meditative register. The lack of follow-up entries by 2025 reflects Marvel Studios' broader reassessment of which Phase 4 properties would receive sequel investment.