The Marvel Cinematic Universe has spent a lot of Phase Four introducing us to new characters. Eternals is a film full of new members of the MCU, but a couple of the most interesting come during the Eternals mid-credits scene. Patton Oswalt voiced Pip the Troll and Harry Styles was introduced as Eros, the brother of Thanos. We don’t really know what any future plans are for the character, and even Eros creator Jim Starlin admits including Eros won’t necessarily be easy.
The introduction of Eros at the end of Eternals is done in a fairly comedic way, but in Marvel Comics, Eros, while tending to be less evil than his brother Thanos, isn’t actually a very nice guy. Speaking with Inverse, creator Jim Starlin says using Pip the Troll in the MCU will be easy, because he can just be a comic relief character, but Eros has been written previously as an actual sexual predator, making him a “tricky” character to introduce into the modern MCU. Starlin says…
Eros, on the other hand, he's an interesting one. I have no idea what they're going to do with him. I sort of left him as a sociopath and he is sort of a sexual predator. So I'll be curious to see how the MCU Eros fares up against the other one. Especially in this day and age. So that's always a tricky one.
Eros was first introduced in 1972 and back then his extreme interest in the opposite sex and the way he treated them might not have been seen in quite the same light that it could be today. Eros has actually been accused of sexual assault in the pages of Marvel Comics in the past as well as using his powers to achieve various sexual conquests.
We could certainly see a version of Eros like this, where the character is far more villain than hero. At the same time, seeing a villain in the MCU who could be described as a sexual predator would certainly be something new for the MCU. A character like that would need to be handled with a certain delicacy that Marvel Studios hasn’t necessarily had to worry about in the past.
Alternatively, we could see a more family friendly version of Eros who simply doesn’t go down that sort of path, allowing Marvel to avoid the more complicated aspects of the character. He can even still be a sociopath, but in the same vein as many other MCU villains could technically be described that way.
Of course, when we’ll get an answer to the question of how the MCU will handle Eros is anybody’s guess. While we have a pretty good outlook on upcoming Marvel movies in the next couple years of projects, there’s no place that we know for sure that we’ll see a payoff to Eternals post-credits scene.
It’s being said an Eternals 2 is coming, but it has yet to be officially announced. As such, it could be quite some time before we see Harry Styles in the MCU again. Although, that will give Marvel plenty of time to figure out how to handle this character.
