Marvel Studios
On paper, Marvel Studios’ 2021 film Eternals should’ve been a home run.
Its director, Chloe Zhao, had just won the Academy Award for Best Director AND Best Picture. It featured an eclectic ensemble cast that included Richard Maden, Gemma Chan, Barry Keoghan, Brian Tyree Henry, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani, Ma Dong-seok, Lauren Ridloff, Lia McHugh, Kit Harington, and even Harry Styles in a post-credit scene cameo.
Its source material, similar to the widely-beloved 2014 film Guardians of the Galaxy, featured a unique, largely unheard-of, cosmic-focused team (albeit more mythical than Gunn’s Guardians).
And yet, the film flopped. Hard. While it made over $400 million at the box office, its reported budget was a bloated ~$230 million. It was also dismissed by both critics and fans, as the film has a 47% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes (its audience score is a bit kinder at 77%).
The failure of Eternals hit Nanjiani particularly hard, as the former Silicon Valley star recently revealed that he had to go to therapy to cope with the negative reviews.
“I had the best time doing that movie, and I realized this is how work should feel like,” Nanjiani said during a recent appearance on the Inside of You podcast. “However, when that movie came out and the reviews weren’t good, that was very, very tough for me and I realized that too much of how I’m evaluating what I want to do is based on the result of what other people think of it.”
“I think there was some weird soup in the atmosphere for why that movie got slammed so much, and I think not much of it has to do with the actual quality of the movie,” he explained. “It was really hard, and that was when I thought it was unfair to me and unfair to [my wife] Emily, and I can’t approach my work this way anymore. Some s— has to change, so I started counseling. I still talk to my therapist about that.”
The website Showbizgalore — which, to be perfectly clear, has no known reputability and does not cite their sources, so their information should be taken with a grain of salt — says Nianjani earned $3 million for his role as Kingo in Eternals.
For comparison, Jeremy Renner reportedly earned $6 million for Avengers: Age of Ultron, while Chris Hemsworth made a reported $15-20 million for Avengers: Endgame, which puts Nanjiani’s earnings of $3 million in a realistic wage.
Now, while the earning of money should never be confused with the obtaining of happiness, the fact remains that bad reviews happen and an actor should be prepared to deal with those things. It’s a testament to Nanjiani that he realized he cared too much about external validation and is trying to better himself.
Eternals is currently streaming on Disney+.