Kumail Nanjiani has talked, on more than one occasion, about how he got twisted around the axle on 2021 Marvel flop Eternals, from discussing how the reception to the movie sent him into therapy, to how it felt for the shape and look of his body to suddenly be a headline all on its own. He’s talked a bit less about the nuts and bolts of the whole thing, though—which is part of what makes a recent conversation Nanjiani had with fellow stand-up comic Mike Birbiglia fascinating, as the comic revealed exactly how far Marvel was hoping Kingo could go.

This goes down at roughly the 44-minute mark of a recent episode of Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast, where Nanjiani says that the last 15 minutes of his current stand-up set are all about how he was in “this big movie” that then drastically failed to meet expectations. (Birbiglia, somewhat hilariously, asks “No kidding, what was it?” after Nanjiani spends a minute or so talking around the name.) In the process, Nanjiani lays out some information about how Marvel does its contracts—including locking down performers for a good long time, if the studio is inclined to bring them back. (Chloé Zhao’s film ends, after all, with a very confident “Eternals will return…” text tag, which now produces something between an “Aw” and a “Yeah?” from the hindsight-possessing viewer) “I was like, this is going to be my job for the next ten years,” Nanjiani effuses, dreaming of a life where he splits his time between ongoing Marvel stardom and personal projects. “Because I signed on for six movies, I signed on for a video game, I signed on for a theme park ride. They make you sign up for all this stuff. And so you’re like, ‘This is the next ten years of my life.’ And then none of that happened.”

Tragically, Nanjiani did not then go on to describe what the Eternals theme park ride would have been—our inner villain suggests “120 minutes of slow escalation followed by a sudden drop, punctuated by a never-explained Mahershala Ali voice cameo“—but does note that his stand-up set talking through his feelings on the matter is set to arrive on Hulu this December. (He also, very briefly, gets lured into talking a tiny amount of shit—responding to Birbiglia’s “Not everybody gets to be in Eternals” with a wry “Honestly, too many people are—according to the reviews”—before making a joke of the whole thing.)