On view since yesterday, The Eternals is the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but where does it really fit in the timeline of this very rich world?
The more years go by, the more complicated the MCU timeline becomes! It is indeed frequent that works of this shared universe of the big and small screen, make returns in the past. This was for example the case of Captain Marvel (2019), located in the 90s, or more recently of Black Widow, released in 2021 but whose plot took place between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War.
For The Eternals, it’s even more complex because Chloe Zhao’s film takes place both in the past (it begins at the dawn of humanity) and in the present of the Marvel universe, that is after Avengers: Endgame. The feature film thus visits several periods in the life of the ten heroes and spans no less than 7 millennia.
It begins in ancient Mesopotamia, 7000 BC, then it leaps forward to Babylon, in 2500 BC, where the Eternals helped humans build a society. They are then found in the Gupta Empire, in AD 400, in Southeast Asia, before jumping again in time until the fall of the Aztec Empire in AD 1521. -C .. Moments that obviously precede every other MCU movie.
At the same time as Far From Home
On the other hand, part of the plot takes place nowadays and more precisely after Avengers: Endgame. It is also the snap of Hulk (which brought back half of the population of the universe that Thanos had erased in Infinity War) which caused the Emergence, which is none other than the mysterious event that forces the Eternals to come together in the hope of ending it.
Which would suggest that the film takes place very shortly after the last adventure of the Avengers. However, according to producer Nate Moore, The Eternals would actually happen a few months later.
He thus assured the Empire magazine that the film is happening “around the same time as Spider-Man: Far From Home, with the world recovering from Thanos’ attack and half the world’s population returningRemember that the plot of the second solo film dedicated to Peter Parker takes place during the summer of 2024, 8 months after the sacrifice of Iron Man.
Spider-Man is coming back to the cinema soon, in No Way Home:
