New photos from the set of Marvel's Eternals offer a look at the City of the Space Gods, a crucial location from the very first issues of Jack Kirby's Eternals comics. Directed by Chloé Zhao, Eternals will introduce a new team of superpowered heroes, with a cast that includes Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, Gemma Chan and Barry Keoghan.
The Eternals are a race of beings who were created as an offshoot of early proto-humans by aliens called the Celestials. The Celestials have been glimpsed before in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: in Guardians of the Galaxy, the mining hub Knowhere is actually the skull of an ancient Celestial, and a Celestial was also shown wielding one of the Infinity Stones. Concept art for Eternals has shown other Celestials, so we can expect this movie to finally dig into their history - and the impact they've had on the universe.
Kirby's The Eternals #1 opens with an archaeologist and his daughter discovering an ancient Aztec city - the City of the Space Gods. They're accompanied by a cameraman called Ike Harris, who is actually the Eternal Ikaris (the character played by Madden in the movie). Ikaris' intention is to activate the Cosmic Beacon, which will call the Celestials back to Earth. However, while the comics begin in the present day, the Eternals movie will begin thousands of years in the past - further back than any other MCU movie has gone. So, these set photos of the City of the Space Gods may well depict the city as it was when it was first built.
More Eternals set photos, these taken on Fuertaventura in the Canary Islands, were shared by the fan page The Marvelous Squad, showing an enormous gateway to what looks like a castle, with animals depicted on the walls. The architecture is definitely very different from the City of the Space Gods, so this set may be used for a different time period - or perhaps even a completely different planet.
Eternals will be the first completely new franchise introduced in the MCU's Phase 4, and perhaps the biggest gamble for Marvel Studios since Guardians of the Galaxy - though at this point, the MCU has proven so bulletproof at the box office that it's hard to call any movie a gamble. We can probably expect the film to explore the Eternals' ancient conflict with the Deviants, another offshoot of early humanity that were created by the Celestials. However, the potential scope of the movie is huge; recent photos of Gemma Chan's Sersi in modern-day London and a medieval set build indicate that we could follow the Eternals all the way from their very creation to the present day.
Eternals has been in production for several months already at Pinewood Studios, London, but with these sets it looks like there's some considerable location work as well. Hopefully this will mean we get a few more glimpses behind the scenes before production wraps, and the long wait for a trailer begins.
