Eternals is streaming on Disney Plus, which means you can finally watch the film from the comfort of your home. Whether or not you saw it in theaters, the advantage of streaming is that you can pause and rewind the film to catch all the details that you might have missed the first time around. While the Eternals plot needs plenty of fixes with the help of future MCU adventures, it’s still a must-watch film. Eternals is the kind of early Phase 4 movie that will impact the MCU in various ways going forward, considering the big development we’ve just witnessed. The film certainly implies we’ll see the Eternals in other places in the future. That might include a few dead Eternals who could return in other Marvel movies and series.
There’s a brand new rumor that claims one of them might return sooner than we thought. Before we explain how all of that is possible, we’ll warn you that big spoilers follow below.
Why the Eternals deaths don’t matter
We already explained all the Eternals deaths and why they don’t really matter.
Out of the 10 superheroes we get to meet in the movie, we lose four of them during the course of the film. Three of them die. Sprite (Lia McHugh) survives the battle but chooses to become human. She gives up her powers, which means she will live a regular human life and die like the rest of us. But that doesn’t mean she’s done with that Eternals life.
Ajak (Salma Hayek), Gilgamesh (Don Lee), and Ikaris (Richard Madden) are the three dead Eternals at the end of the movie. But their sacrifices are somewhat meaningless. First of all, we’re not really in love with these characters yet. These deaths aren’t like Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) losses in Endgame.
More importantly, the Eternals aren’t living beings. That’s why they survived the snap in Infinity War. They can die, but they can’t die that easily.
Marvel can resurrect anyone
Eternals are basically advanced androids that are built to last. Arishem engineered them to survive for millions of years. As we saw in the movie, the Celestial has plenty of copies of each Eternal. He also stores all of their memories.
The Eternals get wiped after each emergence, much like you’d reset an iPhone to factory settings. You can then restore that iPhone to a previous memory backup. The same goes for Eternals.
That’s to say that Arishem can create another team of identical Eternals if he wants to. All he has to do is implant the original program in new bodies and send them on their way to a different planet.
Marvel doesn’t even need the multiverse to revive these lost characters and give us different versions of them. Bring in the multiverse angle as well, however, and you have different Eternals populating a different reality.
Finally, there’s one other way the dead Eternals come “back to life”. That’s through prequels that focus on specific stories that predate the Tiamut emergence. They’ve been living on Earth for 7,000 years, so there are plenty of other stories to tell.
What’s certain is that the post-credits scene where we get to meet Eros (Harry Styles) teases more Eternals stories. We might even get Thanos (Josh Brolin) back.
The dead Eternal who might return soon
Before we get to any of that, we have a new leak that focuses on one dead Eternal, Ikaris.
The plot twist where he turns bad might have upset some of the fans who thought Richard Madden was playing the leading Eternal superhero. But Ikaris can always come back to life with the help of Arishem. And the Ikaris that Marvel will use next might have no recollection of the events on Earth.
It’s doubtful he survived the sun — at least, we hope Marvel doesn’t do anything that cheap.
The first evidence that Ikaris might return comes from TikTok, per The Cosmic Circle. Emmy Kennard posted a video on the platform of her brother Joe. He happens to have been the stunt double for Madden in Eternals.
Emmy said of the video that no NDAs were broken, but the clip is no longer available on TikTok. She implied that Joe is currently slated to work as a “character coming back into the MCU.”
Joe only worked as an MCU stunt double on Eternals. That implies the character coming back is Ikaris. If accurate, then we might see Ikaris in a different MCU movie soon. But it’s unclear where this dead Eternal might show up next.
We’ll also remind you that Salma Hayek reportedly inked a multiple-movie deal with Marvel. We might see a version of Ajak return in the future, unless they only use her for flashbacks.
