Chloé Zhao recently told Vanity Fair there weren’t a lot of “limitations” when she was directing her Marvel movie “Eternals,” which she called a “dangerous” thing. While the comic book tentpole managed to gross $402 million worldwide in the still pandemic-impacted box office of 2021, it is widely considered among Marvel fans to be one of the worst MCU movies. With a 47% score on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s also one of the worst reviewed.

With fall festival season kicking off, Zhao is finally returning with a new movie titled “Hamnet.” The Focus Features release is her first since “Eternals,” which opened in theaters after she won best picture and best director at the Oscars for “Nomadland.” The film stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as William and Agnes Shakespeare as they grieve the lost of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet.

“’Eternals’ prepared me for ‘Hamnet’ because it’s world-building,” Zhao told the publication. “Before that, I had only done films that existed in the real world. I also learned what to do and not to do—what’s realistic and what isn’t. ‘Eternals’ had, like, an unlimited amount of money and resources. And here we have one street corner that we can afford, to [stand in for] Stratford…. ‘Eternals’ didn’t have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous. Because we only have that street corner [in ‘Hamnet’], suddenly everything has meaning.”

“Eternals” was originally supposed to open in November 2020, but the pandemic delayed the project’s release by an entire year. In its original November 2020 slot, “Eternals” would’ve more closely followed the opening of “Avengers: Endgame.” Zhao previously told Empire magazine that the release day combined with the pandemic set “Eternals” up for divisiveness among critics and Marvel fans.

“‘Eternals’ was planned to be released soon after ‘Endgame,’ and not at a time when everyone is having an existential crisis,” Zhao said. “The film itself is about existential crisis, both for humanity and God. So I think we definitely felt [the divisiveness] was coming.”

Zhao also said the fusion of Marvel’s in-house style and her own indie film sensibilities was another source of the movie’s polarization. Fans of Zhao’s “The Rider” and “Nomadland” were disappointed to see more traditional Marvel elements in the film, while not all Marvel fans were on board with Zhao shaking up some of the visual language of the MCU.

“In this case, we truly stepped out of the box that I think the world put us in, and met in the middle because of our shared interests,” Zhao said. “And by truly doing that, it made a lot of people uncomfortable on both sides. But there are also people who are more comfortable with the order of their world [being] disturbed. And then they look at our love-child and go, ‘Oh! This touches different sides of me!’ I like that.”

She continued, “I completely understand the divisiveness coming from critics and the fans. Because when you take this to extremes that are seen as opposition — the world I come from and the world of Marvel, that has been divided in a way that’s so unfair and unfortunate — and to merge the way we did, I actually see the reaction as a testament to how much we had merged with each other; how uncomfortable that might make people feel.”

“Eternals” featured a sprawling ensemble cast that included Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry, Barry Keoghan, Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie, among others. All of these actors were making their Marvel Cinematic Universe debuts with the expectation that they could potentially reprise their roles in future Marvel properties. The film’s poor reception effectively killed those plans. Nanjiani recently revealed on the “Working It Out” podcast that he signed on to star in six Marvel projects but only did “Eternals.”

“I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be my job for the next 10 years,’” Nanjiani said. “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 you’re like, ‘This is the next 10 years of my life, so I’ll be doing Marvel movies every year and, in between, I’ll do my own little things, whatever I want to do.’ And then none of that happened.”

“Hamnet” is set to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival before opening in theaters Nov. 27.