Apart from twatter and Bobby here, I have see no people talking about this movie.
None of my friends, coworkers etc.
What is going to kill the MCU is not that the movie turn into shit but indiffrence.
Agreed. I don't expect that any Mahvel movies will ever turn out to be completely unwatchable garbage, including Eternals. There's always been a base level of competence at play: a basic yet coherent story, actors delivering their lines, cameras turned on and pointed at the scene, CGI fights and explosions, etc. I doubt that will change anytime soon, barring Disney going nutso and hiring someone like Neil Breen (god, can you
imagine).
But it's that consistency and failure to push the envelope that will slowly but surely be its downfall. The coof threw a big wrench in the works and disrupted their plans to keep churning out three or four capeshit movies every year until the heat death of the universe, but even if it hadn't, general audiences would likely still be reaching their limit about now. Endgame really was a good place to stop, with the majority of plotlines resolved, the conclusion of the overarching story built up since the first Avengers movie, and endings for several of the most bankable characters. Hell, there wasn't even a post-credits scene to my recollection. It was the perfect time to ride off into the sunset, to go out on top, to have the legacy of the biggest shared cinematic universe of all time, likely never to be outdone.
But that's not how Hollywood works, and so now, to reference
Dead Homer Society, we're in Zombie MCU. After spending the better part of a decade building up Thanos and finally delivering a payoff, Disney is now in a state of "what the fuck do we do now?" Maybe you could potentially compare this to the very beginning of the MCU when it took a few years to actually get to the first Thanos teaser, but that was when there was only one movie coming out every year on average, with the first hints of the Infinity Stones coming in Thor, the fourth movie overall. That was also when there wasn't anything to build off of yet; now that there's over a decade of movies (to say nothing of TV shows), there should at least be something that points towards where they're going next. From all I've seen of the plot synopses of Phase Four so far, there's jack shit. The only thing I can see by looking ahead to movies on the horizon is parallel universes and multiple timelines, but A, there's still nothing in the movies proper about that so that's cheating, and B, that's 100% going to turn into a clusterfuck.
I won't deny that a lot of this comes down to marketing, convincing people that they need to consoom product and get excited for next product. But when said product has to stand on its own merits and doesn't have that marketing hook of building up to the next big thing, audiences are left feeling kind of meh about it. By playing it safe all these years, Disney wrote their own ticket to a slow death by indifference. The coof only exacerbated this; by forcing people to go without their capeshit for over a year, it probably broke a lot of them out of the habit of ritualistically consooming the latest in the series. And without that compulsion driving them, it's no surprise people are meeting Phase Four with increasing indifference. The movies are still doing fine at the box office, but they're not doing gangbusters like Disney wants.
And thus, we get to Eternals. I'm not gonna act like a prognosticator and claim that I know how the box office is going to end up, nor am I going to go full clickbait and ask rhetorically "IS THIS GONNA BE THE FIRST MCU FLOP?!" But speaking as someone who watched everything through Endgame and jumped off there, there is absolutely nothing about Eternals that entices me to come back, to say nothing of the rest of Phase Four (Black Widow was too little too late and also dumb, and Shang-Chi gets a resounding "meh" from me). A sprawling cast that means most will get little more than the bare minimum character development, cryptic trailers that are more about acting mysterious than providing an interesting hook, and the same competent-but-tired CGI as a replacement for real actors doing actual things. As much as Bobby believes it's all a conspiracy and "filmbros" have it out for Marvel, it sounds to me like Eternals turned out to be just a meandering mess of a movie, and that's why it's not getting the standard positive reviews.
This turned out to be a lot more than I thought I was going to say about this topic (for someone who hasn't watched a Marvel movie in two and a half years, I sure can write a lot about them). I'll close by once again recommending Dune for those that want a big cinematic experience free from the trappings of quippy capeshit, and once again mocking Bob for his blatant consoomer shilling. An absolute fucking moron.
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