Throughout Eternals, an emotionally-inert foray into the cosmic origins of Marvel’s cinematic universe, there are multiple moments meant to show you how the Eternals themselves grew to love and identify with humanity during the thousands of years they spent living on Earth in varying degrees of secrecy. This essay contains spoilers for Marvel’s Eternals. Eternals’ sex scene might not technically be Marvel’s first, or particularly “fun” to watch, but it’s one of the movie’s more clever ways of stating the obvious about how its story is going to end. Daredevil and the rest of the Netflix / Marvel gang spent seasons getting it in over in their neck of the cinematic universe, and those shows very much laid some groundwork for Eternals’ much-tamer take on superpowered sex. Marvel’s Eternals from director Chloé Zhao was a film of many firsts for the studio, but it would be a bit inaccurate to say that it featured the MCU’s first sex scene, as a lot of people seem to think it did.
