5) Phastos, Eternals
We’ll get to Marvel’s own awkward history of acknowledging queer characters a bit later, but suffice to say, it’s not ideal that they somehow managed to get two entries here. After years of lip service from the studio, Chloé Zhao’s new movie gives us Brian Tyree Henry’s long-living Eternals hero Phastos. He’s an openly queer man with a husband, who even gets to share thefirst same-sex kiss in Marvel’s decade-plus history of filmmaking, and even a son. And that’s it! He gets to be normal when not punching up giant monsters from outer space! How lovely. (No, seriously, this is good.)
The problem here is that Marvel has been making films in the MCU for over a decade now, and executives have spent a good portion of that decade acting like they haven’t had the power to include LGBTQ characters as more than either a future promise down the line or a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it attempt to get a pat on the back. Phastos may just be “the start,” as Producer Kevin Feige told Variety at the Eternals premiere, but that’s far from respectable or laudable when Marvel Studios has 26 movies and 4 streaming shows (and many, many more on the way) under its belt already.
