Eternals' Original Pitch Explained Its Biggest Problem

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Eternals' original pitch explained the movie's biggest problem. The movie's behind-the-scenes documentary revealed that director Chloe Zhao pitched the film to Marvel using William Blake's poem «Auguries of Innocence,» which begins: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour." While this poem conveys a great idea, its execution didn't quite work.

Eternals follows the lives of ten superpowered beings sent to Earth centuries ago to rid the world of Deviants. The film jumps back and forth between time periods and characters to tell its story, which ultimately made it a bit harder to remain invested. Eternals received mixed reviews from critics, who classified it as the first «rotten» Marvel film on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as general audiences, who struggled at times to connect to the large cast of new and relatively unknown characters.

Related: Why Eternals' Reviews Are So Mixed

In Disney+'s Marvel Studios Assembled documentary for Eternals, Chloe Zhao explained that she wanted to capture something incredibly big in scale and, at the same time, very intimate. As Blake's poem put it, her plan was: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand." Zhao hoped to portray a large-scale conflict covering all of time and space, with a large array of new characters and cosmic beings, by focusing on personal stories of individual people. She tried to do this by showing audiences the great city of Babylon while also exploring Sersi's developing relationship with Ikaris or by highlighting Phastos' difficulty balancing his concerns for his family with his concerns for the planet. In other words, Zhao wanted to hon in on the life of each Eternal throughout