Summary
- Gunn initially didn’t want Thanos in Guardians of the Galaxy due to focusing on the central characters’ development.
- Thanos was included in the film at Marvel Studios’ request to contribute to the overall MCU story.
- Marvel gave Gunn creative freedom in crafting the Guardians trilogy, only specifically requesting Thanos’ inclusion.
James Gunn’s first Guardians of the Galaxy film has become one of the defining films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With the movie celebrating its tenth anniversary of release this summer, we’ve been looking back on the film and exploring the role that the Guardians of the Galaxy movies have played in building the long-term success of the MCU and how Gunn has become one of the most prominent figures in the comic-book movie space.
While Gunn may be in the driver’s seat for DC Studios now, when he was beginning his collaboration with Marvel a decade ago, he was still an up-and-coming filmmaker who had yet to prove himself as a blockbuster director. Guardians of the Galaxy certainly changed that, though Gunn has spoken over the years about the compromises that he had to make when producing the movie. One of the biggest was the inclusion of Thanos, the big bad of the entire Infinity Saga, in the film.
James Gunn Didn’t Think Thanos Fit in the Story
When writing Guardians of the Galaxy, Gunn was intrigued by the potential inclusion of Thanos in the story. Given that two of the lead characters, Gamora and Nebula, were the adopted daughters of the Mad Titan, there was a clear opportunity for Marvel’s most notorious villain to show up. However, Gunn wasn’t keen on shoehorning the character into the story just because this opportunity presented itself.
With Guardians, Gunn was very focused on introducing the central characters — Peter Quill, Gamora, Drax, Rocket Raccoon, and Groot — and building all of them out into fully-developed roles that would be compelling to audiences. That didn’t leave a lot of room to develop other characters who weren’t essential to the story. Gunn didn’t want to throw Thanos into the mix without being able to give the character the attention he deserved.
Speaking with Vulture around the release of the film, Gunn openly discussed the difficulty of including Thanos in the story. He stated that “[Thanos’] presence doesn’t really serve being in Guardians, and having [him] be in that scene was more helpful to the Marvel universe than it was to Guardians of the Galaxy. I always wanted to have Thanos in there, but from a structural standpoint, you don’t need him.” Later on, the director discussed this more on Twitter, saying that “[Thanos] was an extra complication that made the story a lot more difficult to tell.”
Furthermore, Gunn was wary of including Thanos because he feared that including a villain as powerful as that could overshadow the primary antagonist of Guardians of the Galaxy, Ronan the Accuser, played by Lee Pace. In that same discussion with Vulture, Gunn elaborated on this, saying “Part of it is the fact that you’re setting up this incredibly powerful character, but you don’t want to belittle the actual antagonist of the film, which is Ronan. You don’t want him to seem like a big wussy.” Gunn’s solution to this was to have Ronan kill the Other, Thanos’ primary henchman who was seen wielding power over Loki in The Avengers, which in turn underscored the power and determination of Ronan.
Did the MCU Debut Thanos Too Soon?
While Thanos proved a formidable villain in the Infinity Saga, considering the unexplored comics storylines, did the MCU debut him too soon?
The Mad Titan’s Inclusion Was a Studio Requirement
So, if Gunn didn’t want to include Thanos in Guardians of the Galaxy, why did he do it? Well, the answer is pretty simple. He had to. Thanos’ inclusion in the first Guardians film was something that Marvel Studios specifically requested of Gunn when he was crafting the film. The inclusion of Thanos was meant to add to the overall story of the MCU, not the specific story told in Guardians of the Galaxy. This put the director in a bit of a bind, as he had to find a way to work with this request for something that he didn’t really want to do. Ultimately, Gunn kept the purple titan’s role in the film pretty minimal, as he only appears in two brief scenes.
However, this also meant that the responsibility of casting the franchise’s primary antagonist also fell on Gunn to some degree. While the franchise’s casting director, Sarah Hailey Finn, and Marvel Studios’ president, Kevin Feige, obviously had a lot of involvement with the decision, Gunn was also given a lot of say considering the character would be making his complete debut in Gunn’s film. Speaking about this responsibility, Gunn has said that Thanos needed to be an imposing character that had a lot of weight to him. The director says that he and the Marvel Studios team auditioned many people for the role, but that Josh Brolin quickly became the clear answer.
The fact that Thanos was only in Guardians of the Galaxy because Marvel Studios requested it from James Gunn is interesting because it is one of only a few parameters that the studio gave the filmmakers across his trilogy of movies. Gunn has been very open about how much room Marvel gave him to tell the stories he wanted to tell, going as far as saying that the inclusion of Thanos was the only thing that Marvel ever explicitly asked of him. For a franchise as massive as the MCU, this level of creative freedom is rare, though it does help that the Guardians of the Galaxy movies exist largely independently of the rest of the MCU, which is primarily set on Earth.
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Gunn Created a Cornerstone of the MCU in 90 Minutes
On a related note, Gunn says that Marvel also gave him the option to create an origin for the Infinity Stones in his Guardians of the Galaxy film. This was a pretty sizable responsibility, considering the massive role that the Infinity Stone would go on to play throughout the rest of the films in the Infinity Saga, primarily Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Gunn talked about this aspect of writing Guardians of the Galaxy while promoting the third Guardians film, and his final Marvel film, last year.
While speaking with Phase Zero, Gunn opened up about how much thought he put into the creation of the Infinity Stones, which was apparently not very much. While laughing with star Chris Pratt, he said, “I wrote that scene in about an hour-and-a-half, just like came up with what the Infinity Stones were, and [everything in the MCU] is based on that … I just made up this bulsh*t.”
While the MCU is often spoken about as if the entire thing was planned out from step one, with little deviation from that original plan, Gunn’s approach to including both Thanos and the Infinity Stones in Guardians of the Galaxy clearly shows that’s not entirely true. While there may have been general ideas about where everything was going, many of the details were improvised along the way. If anything, this makes the incredible success of the Infinity Saga even more of a miracle, as so many different directors and creative voices were able to come together and craft one large narrative that (mostly) fits seamlessly together.
