Marvel’s Eternals may have been given a rough ride when it landed in cinemas the month before Spider-Man: No Way Home, with a barrage of bad reviews on Rotten Tomatoes making the epic introduction of over a dozen new MCU characters the worst rated movie in the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, despite being the only “rotten scored” movie from the MCU on the site, The Direct reported Eternals arrival on Disney+ has seen it become a record-breaker as the biggest MCU debut on the platform, with over two million U.S. households viewing the movie within its first five days.
Eternals cinematic run landed in an uncertain time for Marvel, and for a long while it seemed that the movie was destined to launch with a Disney+ simultaneous release in the same way as Black Widow before it. However, the success of Shang-Chi and the Legend of The Ten Rings saw Disney and Marvel Studios take the decision to make all future MCU movies cinematic exclusives for a period of at least 45 days, with the films then moving to streaming on Disney+. Eternals therefore earned the strange accolade of being the sixth highest grossing movie of the year at the domestic box office, despite being having the lowest opening weekend of the previous Phase 4 MCU offerings.
However, the worldwide figures delivered a different picture, with the film outperforming both Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of The Ten Rings with a $401.9 million gross that was huge in compared to other releases of the last two years. What held the movie back from achieving more in cinemas is still unclear, but it was some combination of the film not being linked to an existing set of MCU characters, many people not wanting to venture out into cinemas for a movie they didn’t know that much about and possibly some of those negative reviews led some to simply sit back and wait for the movie to land on Disney+ just a couple of months later.
Eternals Performance Is Tricky to Compare, But Overall It Landed With a Big Bang
When looking at the performance of Eternals, two million streams in five days is a decent figure, but comparing it outside the Marvel bubble with HBO Max movies like The Suicide Squad and The Matrix: Resurrections, the film didn’t gain the same amount of views as those two movies did in the same time period. Of course, both The Suicide Squad and The Matrix Resurrections were released on HBO Max at the same time as they made their cinematic debut, and when it comes to cinema audience numbers, the gross of those two movies combined was less than Eternals box office haul. Eternals also managed to pull in more views than either Cruella or Mulan, which both were given a day and date release on Disney+ and brought in 686,000 and 1.2 million respectively.
The Disney+ reception for Eternals has proven that the film was worth more than its initial cinema release would suggest, and it will be interesting to see what kind of response this brings in terms of the overall audience approval score that the movie holds on sites like Rotten Tomatoes. Although there is currently no information on when or how the characters introduced in Eternals will return to the MCU, we do know that there are a number of projects being lined up featuring the newest MCU superhero family, and these Disney+ figures will add some confidence to those projects moving forward.