Prior to July 2018, James Gunn and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy were practically synonymous. How times change…
To recap: due to a series of crude and offensive tweets from yesteryear, Gunn was dismissed from the MCU, leaving Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 without a director and the cosmic side of Marvel’s cinematic juggernaut in need of a new shepherd.
Even to this day, that search is still very much ongoing, with reports indicating that Disney is in no rush to replace Gunn at the helm of Guardians 3. Be that as it may, if the director’s old social media messages (not those ones) are anything to go by, he may not have wanted to return for the third installment anyway, though before we get into the weeds, it should be noted that these comments date back to June 2016…
Right now I really am just concerned with doing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I’m not sure what I’m going to do after this… Marvel has talked to me about continuing on. I’m not sure if that’s what I want to do or if that’s not what I want to do. I’m not yet sure whether I’m going to do Vol 3. This one [Guardians 2] was more emotionally exhausting.
In a separate post (h/t MovieWeb), James Gunn even went so far as to suggest that he might’ve passed up the opportunity to direct Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
There will be a Guardians 3, that’s for sure. We’re trying to figure it out. I’m trying to figure out what I want to do really, that’s all it is. I got to figure out where I want to be, what I want to spend the next three years of my life doing. You know, I’m going to make another big movie; is it the Guardians or something else? I’m just going to figure it out over the next couple of weeks.
Again, we should stress that these quotes are more than two years old at this point, and therefore don’t necessarily reflect Gunn’s mindset of 2018. After all, he finished a draft of the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 screenplay before things started to unravel, so it would be foolish to take these comments – comments made during crunch time on Vol. 2 – as gospel.
