Last week, the trailer dropped for what will be the 26th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise: Eternals, directed by Chloé Zhao. Opening with a dreamy, misty shoreline, we hear Skeeter Davis’s The End of the World. An ominous spaceship appears over the ocean, and the Eternals begin to prepare for the impending battle.
This year, Zhao was only the second woman (and first woman of colour) to win Best Director at the Academy Awards: a reminder of Hollywood’s entrenched gender and race biases. The cinematic world of Marvel, which began with Iron Man in 2008, has been similarly male and white.