{"id":369086,"date":"2025-08-24T06:06:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T06:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/369086\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T06:06:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T06:06:11","slug":"kumail-nanjianis-eternals-contract-included-six-movies-and-a-video-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/369086\/","title":{"rendered":"Kumail Nanjiani’s Eternals contract included six movies and a video game"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kumail Nanjiani has talked, on more than one occasion, about how he got twisted around the axle on 2021 Marvel flop Eternals<\/a>, from discussing how the reception to the movie sent him into therapy<\/a>, to how it felt for the shape and look of his body to suddenly be a headline all on its own<\/a>. He\u2019s talked a bit less about the nuts and bolts of the whole thing, though\u2014which 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.<\/p>\n

This goes down at roughly the 44-minute mark<\/a> of a recent episode of Birbiglia\u2019s\u00a0Working It Out\u00a0podcast, where Nanjiani says that the last 15 minutes of his current stand-up set are all about how he was in \u201cthis big movie\u201d that then drastically failed to meet expectations. (Birbiglia, somewhat hilariously, asks \u201cNo kidding, what was it?\u201d 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\u2014including locking down performers for a good long time, if the studio is inclined to bring them back. (Chlo\u00e9 Zhao\u2019s film ends, after all, with a very confident \u201cEternals will return\u2026\u201d text tag, which now produces something between an \u201cAw\u201d and a \u201cYeah?\u201d from the hindsight-possessing viewer) \u201cI was like, this is going to be my job for the next ten years,\u201d Nanjiani effuses, dreaming of a life where he splits his time between ongoing Marvel stardom and personal projects. \u201cBecause 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\u2019re like, \u2018This is the next ten years of my life.\u2019 And then none of that happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tragically, Nanjiani did not then go on to describe what the\u00a0Eternals\u00a0theme park ride would have been\u2014our inner villain suggests \u201c120 minutes of slow escalation followed by a sudden drop, punctuated by a never-explained Mahershala Ali voice cameo<\/a>\u201c\u2014but 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\u2014responding to Birbiglia\u2019s \u201cNot everybody gets to be in\u00a0Eternals\u201d with a wry \u201cHonestly, too many people are\u2014according to the reviews\u201d\u2014before making a joke of the whole thing.)<\/p>\n