Eternals director Chloé ZhaoPhoto: Jon Kopaloff (Getty Images for Lexus)
Sex doesn’t really exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Most of us just assume that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts’ child from Avengers: Endgame was the product of banter-based copulation. Nevertheless, Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, armed with her Academy Award and a desire to present Eternals as a movie for serious people, aims to change that.
Eternals will be the first Marvel movie to depict the physical act of lovemaking. That’s right. Two main characters in the film will bump uglies, do the horizontal hustle, knock boots, give it a little of the old [wolf whistle][dog panting] [old timey car horn “owooga”]. Which is to say, there’ll be a brief, PG-13 sex scene in the movie that (as you can see, dear reader) we’re all mature enough to handle.
“From that moment to what you see on-screen there was definitely a lot of discussion about how to do it,” Zhao told IndieWire. “But I think the desire to do something different is a very natural desire for where Marvel Studios is right now. I think it’s like Westerns coming into the revisionist period of the ‘70s. I think it’s happening to superhero films — or at least we’re on the edge of that. And so these scenes just started to happen naturally.”
“For us to be able to show two people who love each other, not just emotionally and intellectually but also physically, and to have a sex scene that will be seen by a lot of people that shows their love and compassion and gentleness—I think it’s a really beautiful thing.”
Many expect Zhao to bring a naturalistic approach to superhero movies, notably Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige. Earlier this year, after seeing Eternals footage of the Earth’s natural splendor shot with a motion picture camera, Marvel Studios honcho reportedly bragged about the cinematography to Disney execs, like he had just seen the Lumières brothers’ The Arrival Of A Train (albeit sans the screaming).
“And I had to keep saying, ‘This is right out of a camera; there’s no VFX work to this at all!’” Feige said. “Because it was a beautiful sunset, with perfect waves and mist coming up from the shore on this giant cliffside — really impressive stuff.”
