At Marvel, as at another Disney company like Lucasfilm, renowned or up-and-coming screenwriters and directors are occasionally contacted to see how they can take advantage of the intellectual properties they have in their possession. One of these tested authors was John Ridley, when television series were still being developed from Marvel Television, which in 2019 was integrated into Marvel Studios so that all audiovisual production was cohesive and the television and cinematographic efforts rowed in the same direction under the baton by Kevin Feige.
Ridley began developing the series in 2015 for the American channel ABC, which was then broadcasting Agents of SHIELD and premiering Agent Carter, the Captain America spin-off with Hayley Atwell. The screenwriter was in his best professional moment. In 2014 he had won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for his work on 12 Years a Slave, which also won the award for best film, and that same 2015 he released the series American Crime, a critically acclaimed social drama with Felicity Huffman. and Timothy Hutton.
Like so many projects in development, the hypothetical Marvel series that Ridley was supposed to sign disappeared from the map without a sound. The brand generated too much noise to pay attention to. Between 2015 and 2017, Marvel Television released Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher and The Defenders for Netflix, a move that was interpreted as the translation of the Avengers strategy to television, and Noah Hawley, the author of Fargo made the most adult approach to the Marvel universe with Legion for FX.
What comic book characters was Ridley trying to launch or relaunch in the audiovisual field? What approach did you want to give them? And why didn’t the project go ahead? Now, thanks to an interview on the Comic Book Club podcast, it has been possible to recover the forgotten series and finally discover who the protagonists were going to be. “It is no longer running. It was a television version of The Eternals (Los Eternos) but a good one,” he dropped.
It seems that when Marvel Television became part of Marvel Studios, the project was scrapped. The characters of Ajak, Sersi, Ikaris, Kingo, Sprite, Phastos, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh and Thena, created by Jack Kirby in 1976, were given to Ryan Firpo and Kaz Firpo to write a theatrical film that they offered to director Chloé Zhao, who contributed to the text and won the Oscar for best director and best film for Nomadland the year before releasing the adaptation.
Ridley, however, was not convinced by Zhao’s naturalistic approach, the riskiest Marvel film to date. “My version was the good version,” boasted Ridley, who considers Zhao’s film not particularly good. In his never-produced series, the story began with “a young guy, probably 18, and he’s sitting down.” The character raised his hands, in which he had a drill, and started it: “And he puts the drill in his ear. And he starts to squeeze. And the thing starts from here. This is a starter, right?”
He also announced that in the script there was another boy who slept in a bathrobe and covered his body with aluminum: “It was a strange story about these people who are simply strange.” In the Marvel offices, however, he had an irregular reception for which he blames the Eternals themselves, which are “a very difficult property to adapt”, although he thinks that perhaps it was for the best: perhaps with him the work would not have been entertaining. in the terms that Hollywood expects from a Marvel movie.
The irony of discovering this Marvel series that will never be filmed and will never be seen is that, listening to him talk about his version of The Eternals, one can almost interpret the statements as a reading of Zhao’s Eternals.
With Angelina Jolie, Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Salma Hayek, Barry Keoghan and Kumail Nanjiani in the shoes of the super-powered beings, the film was interpreted as a version that was not commercial enough because it was from Marvel, it was argued that they were complicated characters to handle. creatively to bring it to the general public and Zhao’s very personal view when filming the story was criticized.
Ridley, who defends a vision of entertainment beyond the conventional mainstream, precisely attacks the most authorial production of the Marvel cinematic universe.
