12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley says his scrapped Marvel project for ABC was going to be an Eternals TV series.
If you’ve got a good memory, you might just recall that John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) was tapped to develop a Marvel TV series for ABC way back in 2015. The project didn’t move forward, but while speaking on the Comic Book Club podcast, Ridley revealed that it would have been an Eternals TV series.
“It’s not in the works anymore,” Ridley said. “It was a television version of The Eternals… but good.” Marvel Television was in charge of the small-screen side of the MCU at the time, but when they were folded into Marvel Studios, the project was officially scrapped. However, Ridley believes that his Eternals TV series would have been better than the movie which was released in 2021.
“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.“
Ridley went on to tease the opening of the series: “My version started with, the first thing you see is a young man, probably about 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 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.“
At the end of the day, Ridley admitted that it’s probably for the best that the Eternals TV series didn’t happen with him at the helm. Although he thought his version was good, he doesn’t know if it would have been entertaining for everyone. “What’s entertaining to me is often not entertaining,” Ridley said. “Populist, which is great for a lot of the work I do, but this needed to be a little bit more popular.“
The big-screen version of Eternals probably needed to be a little bit more popular as well. The film received mixed reviews from audiences and critics, and it remains to be seen if we’ll ever see the continuation of the story.