Trust James Gunn to come along and deliver one of the increasingly rare Marvel Cinematic Universe projects that found critics and audiences in unanimous agreement on its quality, only for it to serve as the filmmaker’s last stand before he jumped ship to DC Studios.
It’s painfully ironic, especially when the student will now seek to become the teacher and avoid all of the pitfalls that have seen Kevin Feige’s once-impenetrable franchise take a repeated battering on the back of several high-profile misfires that ended up increasing the belief the comic book juggernaut is running out of gas.
Any MCU movie that debuts on Disney Plus immediately comes under renewed scrutiny – and more often than not intense criticism – from the second it lands on the platform, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has been no different. In fact, one emboldened Redditor has over-analyzed the cosmic threequel to such a degree that the entire narrative has been repainted as Gunn deliberately and subversively criticizing Disney right before he walked out of the door.
To be fair, it’s not the most far-fetched thing we’ve ever heard when the High Evolutionary is compared to the Mouse House by ruthlessly protecting his IP at any cost, all while he fails to create anything that isn’t either mechanical, repetitive, or outright faulty, with Adam Warlock the wide-eyed denizen who blindly follows his overlord into any situation.
The theory even paints Gunn as the savior and Rocket surrogate, having him subbed in as the smart, unique, and creative mind that gets mistreated and leaves, but not before his overlords mount a campaign to convince him otherwise. That almost certainly wasn’t the intention, but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating.
Published: Aug 3, 2023 01:33 am