Despite being a flop in Rotten Tomatoes and not quite fulfilling the expectation in the cinemas Eternals proved its merits through Disney+.
Marvel’s HTML1: Eternals may have received an uphill battle when it was released in theaters the month prior to Spider-Man the Movie: The Long Way Home and received the flood of bad review at Rotten Tomatoes making the massive introduction of more than 12 different MCU characters the lowest-rated movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet, despite being sole “rotten scored” movie from the MCU on the website, The Direct announced Eternals’ release at Disney+ has seen it be a world record as the largest MCU launch on the site and more than 2 millions U.S. households viewing the film within the initial five days.
Eternal’s cinematic run debuted at an uneasy period for Marvel and for a considerable time it appeared that the film was set to debut with the Disney+ simultaneous release in the same manner like Black Widowbefore it. However, the popularity of Shang-Chi and Legend of The Ten Rings was the catalyst that saw Disney as well as Marvel Studios take the decision to make all the future MCU films exclusive to cinemas for at least 45 days. After that, the films eventually becoming available through Disney+. Eternals consequently earned the odd distinction of being the sixth highest-grossing film of the year on the box office in the US despite the lowest-performing opening weekend among the prior Phase 4 MCU offerings.
The global figures provided a different impression, with the film edging out the two films Black Widow and Shang-Chi as well as the Legend of The Ten Rings with the $401.9 million revenue which was a huge sum when contrast to other movies from the last two years. The reasons that prevented the film from reaching a higher level of success in the cinemas is not clear however it is likely to be a combination of the film’s not being connected to the existing cast of MCU characters, and a lot of people who were not keen to go into the cinema for a film they did not have any idea about, and maybe the negative reviews that led people to just relax and wait for the film to be released in Disney+ just a couple of months in the future.
In analyzing the performance in Eternals 2 million streams over five days is a good number, but when you compare Eternals outside of its Marvel space against HBO Max movies like The Suicide Squad and The Matrix: Resurrections, it didn’t get the same number of viewers that those two films did during the same time. Of of course that’s not the case. The Suicide Squad and The Matrix Resurrections were released on HBO Max at the same moment they premiered in cinemas as well, but when it comes to the number of cinema audiences the total of those two films was lower than Eternals box-office haul. Eternals also managed to draw in more viewers than Cruella or Mulan and both of them were given a specific date and day of launch on Disney+ and brought in the sum of 686,000 and 1.2 million, respectively.
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It is clear that the Disney+ reception for Eternals has shown that the film is better than its original movie release suggests that it was, and it will be fascinating to see what reaction this will generate to the overall rating of the audience that the film receives on websites like Rotten Tomatoes. While there is no details on when or how the characters featured to us in Eternalswill be returning to the MCU however, we have confirmation that there is plenty of projects in the pipeline that feature the most recent MCU superheroes, and the Disney+ figures will add an element of confidence to the projects as they move forward.