As co-CEO of DC Studios, James Gunn is about to be in charge of bringing an entire universe of comic book heroes to the big screen, which sounds like a major job upgrade from simply shepherding the Guardians of the Galaxy across a single movie trilogy. As it turns out, though, the writer/director/producer has had a bigger hand behind the scenes of the MCU than we realized, having a hand in bringing many of the franchise’s most popular latter-day characters into the fray.
We already knew that Gunn was supposed to helm the next “10 to 20 years” of the MCU’s cosmic universe — even if Marvel would love us to forget it — but Gunn has now revealed that he “was consulting on all the Marvel movies” ahead of his career shift over to the Distinguished Competition. As the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 helmer told The Wrap, “Kevin [Feige] would send me the script for Spider-Man and I’d give my notes. He’d send me the script for Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, and I’d give notes on all of those scripts.”
Now that he’s dropped this bombshell on us, Gunn fans will no doubt want to revisit 2016’s Doctor Strange, 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, and 2019’s Captain Marvel to see if they can spot any of his signature flairs hidden in those films. Did Gunn maybe contribute to the 1990s needledrops that pop up in Brie Larson’s MCU debut or else assist on the occasionally irreverent humor found in the Sorcerer Supreme’s origins film?
By the sounds of it, Spidey, Carol Danvers, and Stephen Strange are just a fraction of the characters Gunn sprinkled some of his magic on that we never knew about before. By the sounds of it, Gunn might’ve given notes on every MCU movie released between 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy and his temporary firing in summer 2018. Although whether you want to read anything into his lack of contribution to the infamously unreliable Multiverse Saga, that’s up to you.