John Ridley discloses more about his abandoned Marvel TV series

John Ridley disclosed that the Eternals served as the inspiration for his abandoned Marvel project almost ten years ago.

While the TV show he was producing at ABC in 2015 is "not in the works anymore," the Oscar winner claimed during a recent visit on the Comic Book Club podcast that it was a "television version of The Eternals, but good."

“My version or the good version was so fucking weird,” Ridley recalled. “There was my version, a good version, which is good to me, which that doesn’t mean anything. There was the version that [Marvel] ended up doing, which I don’t think that version was particularly good. I’ll be honest.”

Marvel Studios released the movie Eternals in 2021. Directed by Chloé Zhao, the film features a star-studded cast including Angelina Jolie, Gemma Chan, Kumail Nanjiani, Salma Hayek, Kit Harington, and Richard Madden.

The story follows a group of immortal beings called the Eternals who defend Earth against the Deviants. After winning an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 12 Years a Slave, Ridley described the pilot episode of his series.

“My version started with, the first thing you see is a young man, probably about 17, 18 years old. And he’s sitting there. He’s sitting there for a moment. And then he lifts his hands. He has a drill in it. And he turns the drill on. And he puts the drill to his ear. And he starts pushing it in. And then it goes from there. … That’s how it starts. And then I think you see another kid. He sleeps in the bathtub, covers himself with foil. It’s just a really weird story about these people who are, I mean, it’s just weird.”

But the writer-director admitted his version was a “really hard property [to develop].” He later realized that “the best thing to happen for everybody was that it didn’t happen with me, because I don’t know that it would have been entertaining [for all].”