Marvel's ETERNALS was Original a TV Series & Better Claims Writer

We now know what the untitled series for Marvel Television and ABC was based on—back in 2015, we learned that writer John Ridley (U Turn, Three Kings, 12 Years a Slave) was working on it. The Academy Award winner revealed during a conversation with the Comic Book Club podcast that the long-running series was going to be a small-screen take on Eternals—“but good."

“My version, or the good version, was so f*cking weird,” Ridley recalled. “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.”

“My version started with, the first thing you see is a young man, probably about 17, 18 years old. 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 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.”

He added, “I do mean what’s entertaining to me is often not populist, which is great for a lot of the work I do, but this needed to be a little bit more popular, it really did.”