John Ridley is finally opening up about the Marvel series he was developing at ABC back in 2015.
The Oscar winner made an appearance on the Comic Book Club podcast, where he revealed the Marvel property he had been working on, and it had to do with Eternals.
“It’s not in the works anymore,” Ridley revealed. “It was a television version of The Eternals… But good.”
At the time, Marvel Television was producing shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter, Netflix’s Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, among others. The television arm of Marvel Entertainment was incorporated into the Marvel Studios group and the Eternals series was scrapped.
“My version was the good version,” Ridley said. “It was so f***ing weird. There was my version, a good version, which is good to me, which — that doesn’t mean anything. There was the version that [Marvel] ended up doing, which I don’t think… that version was particularly good. I’ll be honest.”
Marvel ended up producing a film in 2021 based on the Eternals, who are immortal alien beings that emerge from hiding after thousands of years to protect Earth from their counterparts known as the Deviants.
The film was produced by Chloé Zhao and featured an all-star cast that included Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Gemma Chan, Kumail Nanjiani, Kit Harington and many more.
“My version started with, the first thing you see is a young man, probably about 18 years old,” the filmmaker said about the pilot. “And he’s sitting there. He’s sitting there for a moment. And then he lifts his hands. He has a drill in it. And he turns the drill on. And he puts the drill to his ear. And he starts pushing it in. And then it goes from there. That’s the start, right? That’s how it starts. And then I think you see… another kid… He sleeps in the bathtub, covers himself with foil. It’s just a really weird story about these people who are, I mean, it’s just weird.”
Ridley said his take on the Eternals had mixed reviews, saying that it was a “really hard property to develop.” Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that “the best thing to happen for everybody was that it didn’t happen with me, because I don’t know that it would have been entertaining.”
“And I do mean what’s entertaining to me is often not entertaining. Populist, which is great for a lot of the work I do, but this needed to be a little bit more popular,” he added.