If Chloé Zhao has a say, the gay superhero storyline in Eternals won’t be censored for international audiences.
The director of the upcoming Marvel film spoke to IndieWire, where she addressed the precedent of gay moments in films being removed or banned altogether in other countries. She hopes this won’t be the case for her Eternals, which premieres on November 5, and said she expressed to Marvel her “desire” to leave the film intact.
“I don’t know all the details but I do believe discussions were had and there’s a big desire from Marvel and myself — we talked about this — to not change the cut of the movie,” she told the film news site. “Fingers crossed.”
Eternals features a collective of immortal superheroes who live normal lives for centuries until they reunite to battle the Deviants. This includes Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), an openly gay superhero. This is reportedly the first time Marvel has featured an openly queer superhero whose sexuality is actually acknowledged on-screen, not just mentioned in press interviews or assumed from the character’s backstory in the comics.
It’s unclear how much of the film will revolve around Phastos’ personal life, but a trailer for the film shows a brief scene in which fellow Eternals Sersi (Gemma Chan) and Ikaris (Richard Madden) meet him, his partner (Haaz Sleiman), and their child.
The cast and crew cried on set while filming a kiss between Phastos and his partner, as NewNowNext reported last year. The moment is a Marvel first.
“Brian Tyree Henry is such a tremendous actor and brought so much beauty into this part, and at one point I saw a child in his eyes, and I think it’s important for the world to be reminded that we in the queer community were all children at one point,” Sleiman told the queer publication.
There’s a history of films depicting queer characters being censored or altered for overseas markets. In 2017, Russia gave Disney’s Beauty and the Beast an age 16+ rating for an “exclusively gay” moment suggesting that the character of LeFou (Josh Gad) is gay. Two years later, China and Malaysia stripped references to Freddie Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis and sexuality in the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
