Marvel has spent years building up their brand and leaving audiences and fans with expectations involving their MCU super hero films. Somewhere, somehow, someone decided that they needed to reverse course and tell a story about pre-Avengers characters that have been here since humanities earliest times and choose a director known for human interest films, while also having a dozen new characters introduced in one film.

It was a risky decision and it hasn’t seemed to pay off they way they thought it would.

Critics were allowed to start giving early reviews for ‘Eternals’ a little over a week ago, and since then the Rotten Tomatoes score has plummeted and is currently sitting at 53% on the site. (I had to re-write part of this article because it dropped again as I was writing.)

To be fair, Rotten Tomatoes isn’t usually a good indicator of a film because often fans will love a movie while critics hate it and vice-versa. The site is ripe with audience review bombing and review boosting, so it’s not a great way to get a fair picture of the film.  My recommendation is to ignore all “5-star” and “1-star” ratings as the truth likely lies in the middle when it comes to high profile films.

This time I think the critics and audiences are likely going to align more than usual and not in a good way.

As of now, the only scores available are by critics, and unless the media and Disney want to accuse them of “review bombing” the film, the narrative that it is being “bombed” is invalid. However, as soon as audiences chime in, if it goes negative, that narrative will be the first line of defense for this film by the media and Disney spinning it as “bigots” and “hate groups” “review bombing” the film.

We’ve been calling this movie out for quite awhile now. The trailers looked boring and we had concerns about the number of characters they were trying to introduce at once. It seemed to lack the buzz of other MCU films.

The very fact that Disney turned marketing away from ‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ before it’s release to promote the “Eternals” told me that Disney knew they weren’t tracking well on the film.

Now the sites that track and predict box office numbers have dropped their estimates for the three-day opening of the film.

Currently Box Office Pro has the film sitting at a $67-$92 million opening which is down from the $110 million opening that was predicted just a couple of weeks ago.

The media keeps trying to do damage control with today’s headline of “It could be the first pandemic film to break $100 million in the box office.” Sure, it might, but if it does I sincerely believe that tickets were sold, but a bunch of seats sat empty.  It’s not unprecedented.

Only time will tell, but no matter what happens with reviews someone is going to say they are “bombing” or “boosting” so the truth will likely lie in the middle.

I can say that I am surprised that the critics have taken this film down to 53%, by far the lowest critical score for any MCU film including “Thor Dark World” and “Iron Man 2” and that’s saying something.

For those wanting to go, ‘Eternals’ releases on November 5, 2021.

What do you think? Comment and let us know!