How The MCU Has Already Changed The Eternals' Comic Origin

The trailer and the marketing for Marvel’s Eternals movie shows that the MCU is making one major change to the team’s origin story, in regards to where they came from. This group of obscure heroes from Marvel Comics is about to be explored through a movie that dives back thousands of years into the MCU’s history.

In the late 1970s, legendary comic book writer and artist Jack Kirby envisioned the Eternals as a race of immortals powered by cosmic energy who have dwelled on the Earth for several millennia. For an unspecified period of time, these characters managed to keep their presence a secret from humanity. This concept will be adapted to the MCU in Phase 4 with at least ten of the Eternals from Marvel Comics, including Ikaris, Sersi, Thena, Makkari, Gilgamesh, and more. Like their comic book counterparts, the MCU’s Eternals have been on the planet for an untold number of centuries. Aside from providing occasional guidance, the team has avoided directly interfering in human affairs.

So far, they share a lot of similarities from the characters in the comics, but at least one big difference in their origins has already been revealed. The Eternals trailer shows their spaceship arriving on Earth, with Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Sersi (Gemma Chan) looking down on them. Right in line with the marketing calling them an alien race, this scene points to the Eternals originating from a distant world. This is a bit different to the origin story offered by Kirby, whose comic depicted them as cosmic beings native to Earth.

Ikaris looking to his left while on the Eternals' ship

In the original Eternals comic, it was revealed that they were genetically engineered by the Celestials, who created both them and the Deviants from the DNA of humans found during their visit to Earth. Some Eternals ended up leaving the planet and forming colonies elsewhere, but Zuras’ group (the one featured in the movie) remained on Earth. So in the comic books, Eternals like Starfox and Thanos who hail from Titan can certainly be classified as aliens, but that description doesn’t really apply to Ikaris, Thena, and all the others who have lived on Earth from the very beginning.

It remains to be seen how this difference will be important in Eternals. Regardless, the idea that the Eternals came from someplace else obviously opens up some interesting questions pertaining to whether or not they were created from the genetic material of the Earth’s humans like the comic characters were, where they’re really from, and why they left. It could be that instead of a few Eternals leaving their Earth base for new planets to inhabit (which is what happened in the comics), the opposite may be what transpired in the MCU. It’s possible that if they lived somewhere else before Earth, such as a Celestial space station or a different planet entirely, flashbacks in the movie will shed light on it.

More: Eternals Trailer Teased The Wrong Hero Taking Over The Avengers