Hollywood whiplash: Chloé Zhao’s sudden shift from history-maker to franchise scapegoat
It’s an accepted part of Hollywood life that any fast-rising filmmaker gaining acclaim and recognition for their work will be the subject of covetous glances from major studios. They didn’t come much more coveted than Chloé Zhao, either, only for her unexpected detour towards Marvel to backfire.
She may not have been a complete unknown in cinematic circles, but to the general public, Zhao might as well have been before Nomadland. Her debut feature, coming-of-age drama Songs My Brothers Taught Me, was a sensation on the independent and festival circuit that instantly marked her out as a filmmaker with a bright future, but it didn’t permeate the pop culture sphere.
The modern western The Rider was a profitable enterprise that recouped its modest $80,000 budget 50 times over from theatres and won even more rapturous praise, but it wasn’t until Zhao united with star and producer Frances McDormand on her third film that she truly announced herself to the wider world.
Widely celebrated as one of the finest films of the decade, the moving portrait of one woman’s journey of self-discovery in the aftermath of a crippling recession was a raw, unflinching, and identifiable character piece defined by McDormand’s entrancing performance, Zhao’s sumptuous eye for composition and detail, and an effortless balance between dreamlike imagery and neorealism.
As director and producer, Zhao picked up a pair of Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, making history several times over in the process. She became just the second woman after Kathryn Bigelow to win the latter prize, as well as the first woman of colour and first woman of Asian descent.
It’s not like Marvel Studios capitalised on her name being among the hottest in Tinseltown by snapping her up after Nomadland, either, with Zhao announced as the director of Eternals in September 2018, two years before her Oscar-winning favourite had even held its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
She was the one who approached the comic book company, too, pitching herself as the perfect candidate to take the reins on a sprawling fantasy epic unfolding over millennia. Thanks to the Nomadland effect, Zhao ended up as the first person to win an Oscar for ‘Best Director’ to take charge of a Marvel flick, which came in handy for marketing purposes.
The jump from small-scale independent films to well-oiled corporate machines can often be a tricky one. It would be an understatement to say there was a fair gulf between the $5million budget of Nomadland and the $236million Eternals was confirmed to have cost. Still, having an inspiring auteur at the helm and a stacked cast that boasted Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Kit Harington, Barry Keoghan, and many more as part of the hefty ensemble would, at the very least, guarantee a well-acted superhero story that was very nice to look at.
That was entirely true of the finished article, but Eternals fell flat where it really mattered. After much fanfare and hype to go along with multiple pandemic-related delays, it almost instantly gained the unwanted distinction of being the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s worst-reviewed entry to date, hardly ideal when it was the 26th instalment in the franchise and the first with an Oscar winner at the helm.
A final tally of $402million at the box office wasn’t too bad considering the circumstances of the time, but it was in the aftermath that things started to look more sombre. It was the lowest-grossing debut for a movie starring new MCU characters in ten years, the lowest-grossing theatrical exclusive in a decade, and the fourth lowest-grossing of all 26 films Marvel Studios had released at the time.
As tends to be the case with most MCU features, it was promised that the ‘Eternals will return…’ at the end of the credits, but that’s looking increasingly unlikely after head honcho Kevin Feige confirmed to Inverse that “there are no immediate plans for Eternals 2.” For context, the studio has at least eight movies in active development, but Zhao’s won’t be getting a follow-up, which would make it the one and only time so far Marvel has introduced new title heroes it owns the rights to and not given them at least one more film.
After briefly flirting with the fascinating-sounding prospect of reimagining Dracula as a futuristic sci-fi western, Zhao instead opted to return to her roots for her first post-Eternals project, with Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley starring in fictionalised Shakespearean drama Hamnet.
That’s not to say she won’t be back at the big budget table eventually, but her underwhelming detour into CGI spectacle coming less than two years after Nomadland cleaned up at the Oscars is enough to give anybody whiplash and suggest that maybe it isn’t the best use of their talents.
