‘Guardians 3’ makes a big change to Marvel canon that James Gunn totally forgot to tell us about, until now

Marvel fans often get up in arms whenever a comic book character is completely reimagined for the MCU, but James Gunn might’ve found the best way to prevent that from happening: just don’t tell people about it It was clear from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 that the live-action take on the High Evolutionary was different from the source material, but Gunn didn’t reveal exactly how different until finally prompted to do so by a fan’s question.

One week after the threequel’s global release, Gunn has finally come clean that the High Evolutionary is unique from his comics counterpart in one key way: he doesn’t have the same name. A Twitter user quizzed the filmmaker on if Chukwudi Iwuji’s villain is still called Herbert Wyndham, as is his real name on the page, in the MCU. Gunn’s response? “It is not because he’s from an alien planet.”

In the comics, Wyndham was a 1930s scientist, mentored by the X-Men villain Nathaniel Essex aka Mr. Sinister whose brilliance in the field of genetics eventually led him to head out into space to create his own species. Guardians 3 strongly indicates that the MCU’s High Evolutionary is an alien when he comments that he visited planet Earth a while ago, so we could’ve inferred his origins were very different, but at least we now finally have that confirmed.

This can probably be filed away into one of the smarter changes from the comics the MCU has made. It would be kind of awkward if one of the darkest and most detestable villains in the entire cinematic universe was called Herbert.