This Eternals news is bad news for Phastos fans

The Eternals are officially dead. Marvel has announced that its 2021 ensemble action flick Eternals, which featured the MCU’s first gay superhero, will not return for a sequel.

According to Inverse, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has confirmed that a sequel is not happening. “There are no immediate plans for Eternals 2,” Feige said. “There are, and I think you’ve seen maybe in a trailer we’ve released recently, an acknowledgment of some of those events. Certain giant things came out of the ocean.”

This was a reference to the recent trailer for Captain America: Brave New World, which gave a brief glimpse of the Celestial the Eternals defeated rising from the ocean. Along these same lines, various Eternals plot threads will likely be resolved in other Marvel properties going forward.

For one, Kit Harington’s character Dane Whitman is expected to appear as the Black Knight in the upcoming Blade reboot. Harry Styles was also introduced in the film as Thanos’s brother Eros, and while there seem to be no announced plans for his return, Marvel likely wouldn’t want to leave a major character like that dangling.

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The decision not to continue the Eternals franchise probably comes as little surprise to viewers. The film bombed at the box office and was panned by critics. That might be why Disney CEO Bob Iger reportedly commented that an Eternals sequel would be a “guaranteed flop.”

But even if there’s no official sequel, does that mean the Eternals themselves won’t show up in other Marvel films? Given that Eternals concluded with Marvel’s characteristic teaser message, ​​“The Eternals will return,” it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Of course, Marvel puts that in basically every film—long before the box office results come back.

While many viewers won’t miss the Eternals, queer fans would be missing out on one of the few confirmed gay characters in the MCU. Phastos, played by Bryan Tyree Henry, is an Eternal and master technologist who happens to be gay. He also happens to be featured in the MCU’s first queer family, with a partner (Haaz Sleiman) and child (Esai Daniel Cross) shown onscreen.

But in the event that Phastos does not make a return, Marvel has been gradually introducing queer storylines to the franchise (with the majority of these being brief references). The nearest Marvel property with queer potential is Wandavision sequel Agatha All Along.