James Gunn took to his Instagram account to explain how the original Stan Lee cameo in “Guardians of the Galaxy” was supposed to go down.
Gunn recently spoke at a panel on Sunday at Dragoncon. During the panel, the director revealed the production scrapped Lee’s original cameo. Multiple reports claimed Disney pulled the cameo due to its racy content. However, Gunn assured the scene was cut for creative reason and Disney executives never saw the clip.
“In one take, Stan Lee just slowly turns up his finger, flipping off Groot,” Gunn wrote in the Instagram post. “We shot this footage with a Stan Lee double because Stan wasn’t able to come to the UK at the time. The plan was to shoot Stan in the same lighting when I was back in LA, and we’d digitally replace the double’s head with Stan’s actual head (not quite as difficult as it sounds).
“Although I thought the cameo was funny, I thought the flipping off joke was too similar to the moment earlier in the film where Quill flips off the Nova Corps, so I excised that part of it immediately.”
Gunn claimed his team didn’t like Lee’s original cameo because to was “too broad.” The production was afraid it would be distract from the film and they would “lose” the audience in the process. Gun fought to keep the cameo, but it ended up on the cutting room floor.
“I argued about it for a bit, but we ended up not keeping it in the film,” Gunn wrote. “In a pretty typical case of Internet-journalism-telephone, articles online yesterday said that Disney forbade the scene because of standards. However, that’s incorrect - no one at Disney ever even saw the scene, and it was cut solely for creative reasons.”
