The Oscar winner is taking on her first superhero movie, which suggests there must be more than meets the eye to the Marvel Studios project.

One of Marvel Studios' most mysterious projects is starting to take shape, and with it comes one of the biggest names in Hollywood. Wednesday it was revealed that Angelina Jolie is in talks to join Chloe Zhao's The Eternals. While details on the film have been locked up tighter than Odin's vault, The Eternals, based on the epic saga by comic book legend Jack Kirby, focuses on immortal superpowered beings created by the Celestials, the cosmic giants seen in the Infinity Stones sequence in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Zhao's film is said to be led by Sersi and Ikaris, two Eternals whose love story rests at the center of an eons-spanning conflict. Marvel had no comment on who Jolie might play, but given that she's the first actor to be cast, it seems likely that she's up for the transmutation-powered Sersi. Jolie also looks a great deal like many artists' depiction of the character. But who is Sersi? And what does Jolie's casting tell us about the film?

Unlike the previous films that have made up the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Eternals is based around largely unknown entities, even for most comic book readers. This unknown quality plus the fact that Marvel Comics hasn't made much effort in reprinting Kirby's series or key appearances of the characters (yet), adds a level of excitement and novelty to Zhao's feature. As a property that's more situated in the realm of sci-fi and fantasy than superhero yarns, learning about the Eternals is akin to taking a deep-dive into J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth history or George R.R. Martin's Westeros and Essos. While the Guardians of the Galaxy were mostly unknown to most audiences before 2014, the Eternals are even more of a deep-dive into the Marvel Universe. When it comes to the Celestials, the Eternals and their evil counterparts the Deviants (Thanos' race), this is heavy Marvel mythology, the building blocks of the universe, and far more complex than anything we've seen Marvel Studios adapt thus far. Casting Jolie in a film such as this is a way for Marvel to ground the audience in a complicated mythology with a familiar face. But it's also a signal that if an actress on this level of influence, one who has largely focused on directing and producing of late, is interested, then it must be something special. Marvel Studios, with a few exceptions, has long played the game of star-making when it comes to leading roles, taking talented actors and actresses known from television and award-season breakouts and making them household names or reviving the public's perception of them. There's been a certain tier of actors who first broke box office records and sold magazine covers in the '90s — Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Denzel Washington, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Jolie — who have somehow managed to avoid being in a superhero film. But it now seems as though everyone must do at least one. Despite being a favorite for numerous superhero roles since the '90s and being an early rumored choice to direct Captain Marvel, Jolie has stayed away from superhero movies. Sure, she played Lara Croft twice and starred in the comic adaptation of Wanted (2008), which stripped away the superhero element of Mark Millar's comic, and she went all-in on the costumed villainess in Maleficent (2014) and its upcoming sequel. But she's never played a true superhero before.