STAN LEE Original GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Cameo Image Revealed & Detailed by James Gunn; Disney Had No Say in This


Sometimes a reported account of what someone says can get lost when one person tells another and there's no recording of the actual quotes. This is the case when writer/director James Gunn spoke about Stan Lee's original cameo for Guardians of the Galaxy at Dragon Con in Atlanta this past weekend. (Cue the Journalism 101 proper quotation comments!)

It was originally recounted that Disney had an issue with Stan the Man's cameo in The Collector's collection but Gunn has debunked this with a new image he posted to his Instagram account.



Gunn also wrote the following details about Lee's original cameo scene:

"At a panel on Sunday at Dragoncon, I talked about a deleted [Stan Lee] cameo in Guardians, and promised the folks there I’d post a photo on Instagram - so here it is! 
"As you can see, this is not Stan, but a double. In the original cut of the film, when the Guardians enter the Collector’s museum, Rocket looks over and sees Cosmo the dog in one display case, Quill looks over into another display case and is surprised by a tentacle slapping against the glass, and Groot looks over and sees, in another display case, Stan Lee. In one take, Stan Lee just slowly turns up his finger, flipping off Groot.

"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.

"A couple of the guys at Marvel thought Stan Lee in a case was too broad of a joke in general, and that it took the audience out of the movie. I argued about it for a bit, but we ended up not keeping it in the film.

"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."

So there you go. This is the official word and Disney is off-the-hook for the removal of this scene due to an error in reporting by the original website source.