The Dark Side is strong with James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy!
Well, it almost was!
It’s learned Marvel Studios president and producer Kevin Feige, who happens to be a huge Star Wars fans, wanted to put a Darth Vader Easter Egg in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
While promoting Spider-Man: Homecoming with Mashable, Kevin Feige revealed his Darth Vader plans:
Always, we wanted to reveal at a certain point in the movie that Peter Quill was a human from Earth. And for a long time, I really thought it was going to be the greatest thing in the world that you’re in a spaceship and he’s talking to one of the alien characters and he knocks over his bag and one of the alien characters bends down and picks up and it was a Darth Vader action figure, goes, ‘What’s this?’
Kevin Feige went on to explain that he had the Star Wars Darth Vader action figure idea for a long time, even before Disney acquired Lucasfilm, and added that James Gunn opted not to use Darth Vader and came up with the idea of Star-Lord using the Walkman.
To make a long story short, James Gunn was basically like, ‘I got a better idea. What if he had a Walkman and listened to music?’
And it was like, ‘Oh, that’s a million times better.’ Because the Star Wars thing was just a nerdy reference in a single moment, and obviously, the conceit of the music redefined the entire movie.
My question: Why didn’t they just use both?!
Fans of the MCU will note that Kevin Feige’s love for Star Wars does stretch into all the Phase 2 movies as Feige included a scene where a Marvel character loses an arm, referencing Empire Strikes Back and Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, such as:
• Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3
• Thor in Thor: The Dark World
• Bucky in Captain America: The Winter Soldier
• Ulysses Klaue in Age of Ultron
• Yellowjacket in Ant-Man
• Bucky again in Civil War
• And in Guardians of the Galaxy, Groot loses both his arms while figting Gamora: