James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a strange and rare commodity to emerge in the middle of whatever current “phase” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we’re in at the moment: It’s a good movie. Part of that stems from Gunn’s reluctance to fit any of the oft-mandated tie-ins, cameos and crossovers into his picture. Aside from a few of Doctor Strange’s portal rings making an appearance, you’d be hard-pressed to find the Disney stamp on anything present, unless Bob Iger and Kevin Feige managed to unearth whatever they marked Return to Oz with. That Strange link, though, is somewhat vital given that it easily sets up a warning for all parents in the audience: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter, because you may very well have a terrified and/or traumatized child in the backseat of the CR-V, wailing like they did when they missed the last penalty kick at their last soccer game.
I’m going to do my best to avoid as many specifics as I can here (aside from that one up top), even though you probably can easily find them with a cursory Google search, out of both courtesy to the spoilerphobic and a way to talk about what exactly makes Gunn’s work within the House of Mouse so… epochal. That may feel like an exaggeration, but we’ve seen almost 32 of these things in the period that it took George Lucas to release three whole Star Wars films, three Indiana Jones movies, and Howard the Duck (great movie, by the way). See, the NIMH-like terror that the film elicits from younger viewers and animal lovers alike has, like much of the traits Gunn has bestowed these three films with, emerged from an organic and real place within him. Work long enough with raccoons, and you start thinking that maybe, just maybe, using them for medical experiments is wrong. Vol. 3 revolves around that notion, with the gang working to save Rocket (Bradley Cooper) from the hands of his creator, the High Evolutionary, and when paired up with Gunn’s heart and affection for this entire enterprise — Guardians, not Marvel — it’s often surprisingly effective at tugging on the viewer’s heartstrings. But that application of personal investment and care to an enterprise that would, in another’s hands, be soulless and generic is what Gunn did best during his time at Disney, and it’s what every single Marvel film (aside from Black Panther) has been failing to replicate ever since.
Now that he’s been so throughly memory-holed from the history of Marvel, it can be hard to remember exactly how much of a stylistic force Joss Whedon was in the evolution of Marvel. The framework – catty humor, feints towards meaning, a cameo after the credits — was established by Faverau and company in 2008, but Whedon refined the Earth-bound hero and the world they lived in so well that it felt like it was there all along (look at the clumsiness of Iron Man 2 trying to do the same and how miserably it fails in comparison). He was an expert mixologist, stirring in disparate elements to make something totally intoxicating for audiences all over the planet, and that afforded Marvel a chance to take a risk beyond their normal major and minor ones (the shared-universe concept, and hiring Shane Black at RDJ’s request, for an example of each). Gunn was pulled into the orbit, having spent his career working in Troma-adjacent genre spheres, and given a property of some but not much importance. Remember, the first Guardians came out in August – it wasn’t the main course for 2014, which was Winter Soldier.
Because of this “Eh, fuck it, we can write off a loss with Cap money” attitude and the fact that, in the grand scheme of things, the film was just a Thanos-palate wetter, Gunn was able to put a ton of himself into the project. It’s not like fans would have been banging down the doors over changes to Star-Lord’s origin story, given that nobody really knew who the fuck he was before Chris Pratt danced his way into the audience’s hearts, so he could do what he wished with the plot. Space, aside from Asgard, had been mostly unexplored, so he could design it however he wanted to: Full of well-placed CGI and plenty of practical make-up effects to compliment the lived-in and dirty feel. He could have his characters have meaningful banter without the referential and oft-ironic barbs that Whedon would toss in. He could pull in friends from his other projects, his brother Sean, Michael Rooker, et al, while relegating two of the most bankable stars in the film to voice-over roles. And, finally, he could score it the way he wanted to, which was full of wholly-earnest pop hits from his childhood.
In short, Gunn got to make his movie. Not “a” movie, not a Kevin Feige production, but a movie that comes about as close as a product of “auteur theory” that’s possible within the studio system. And it was these quirks that people responded to, and the level of success caught Marvel off-guard. Just look at Baby Groot. There was no merch on the shelves when audiences left the theater and wandered into the Target in the same shopping mall, so the FunkoPop factory went into overdrive trying to churn them out for Christmas so parents didn’t have to issue I.O. U.’s to their kids like it was 1977 all over again. It was an unexpected phenomenon well before Marvel’s overall dominance at the marketplace was acknowledged — legions of box office nerds raged about the characters not being known and Gunn’s status and the relative lack of star wattage before eating crow — and cemented Gunn’s place at the table. A bloated yet even more emotionally involved sequel came around, and Gunn started working through some deep shit on screen, externalizing the conflict between the modern Pratt-type hero and the Kurt Russells that he grew up idolizing. Hell, even Stallone couldn’t stay away. Vol 2 was a hit, again, getting the primo May slot on the release calendar and a David Hasselhoff single to go with it.
2017 was, as well, the year it all came crashing down. Gunn was fired from this film by Disney over blog posts he’d made years before he became a known Hollywood quantity, the kind of edgelord shitposting most people normally now do anonymously (if they’re wise), but this was the era of Maddox and Tucker Max: people said dumb shit on the internet that they’d never breathe to another person, and were, thanks to the tenor of the Bush years, rewarded for it. Gunn sincerely apologized, Disney persisted, the actors mutinied, Disney persisted, and it was only when Gunn signed up to do The Suicide Squad for The Distinguished Competition that they had second thoughts. Or perhaps they finally realized just how difficult it would truly be to replace him, given that he — in the aftermath of Whedon getting poached by DC and then self-immolating from his own shitty behavior — was now the aesthetic glue that held Marvel together.
Of all the films released since Vol. 2, a majority have been set in Gunn’s cosmic creation, each with diminishing returns. Taika Waititi did a decent job at it with Thor: Ragnarok, but each subsequent attempt by a hired hand at playing with the limitless possibilities afforded to them by the expansion of the universe wound up just slapping a different coat of paint on the Knowhere set and replacing more and more of it with quickly-cranked-out CGI. This reached its apex with Quantumania, which followed Ant-Man on a journey into a subatomic land that… happened to look exactly like the far reaches of outer space, complete with purple heavy who has a conqueror’s ambition and a personal score to settle with a member of the ensemble.
The cheap tune’s the same, it’s just that the potency emerges with how one plays it. Gunn has never been a passionless filmmaker — he’s always pursuing some interest or tackling some deep-seated issue in his work — but due to the genre trappings of his work, he’s often regarded as lacking seriousness. In the confines of the MCU, though, he’s the high-water-mark for what a single creative can do with (and often around) the limitations placed on them by corporate. Just look at the villains in the other movies: they’re not threats, or if they are, they have an ambiguous evil deed in their past. Oftentimes, they’d make for more compelling protagonists than the heroes themselves, a trend that Marvel slowly adopted when craggily-chinned Grimace wiped out half of the universe. With the exception of Ronan the Accuser (that first film is the hardest to purge of its ties to Marvel overall), his villains are characters, and they’re also reprehensible. He gives you conflict, which is the stuff, more than banter or cameos or links to a grander picture that may emerge five sequels, three TV shows, and a Disney+-bound movie later, that drives compelling entertainment, all of which the studio has forgotten in the years since Endgame.
Marvel, like many corporate juggernauts, is a victim of its own success. As long as they kept getting rewarded by audiences for substandard releases, there weren’t any problems that needed to be addressed, nor was there really any reason to try. But so much depended, in the early stages, on passion and showmanship, with Feige acting like Billy Mays to try and sell the nerd press on his bona fides and prove to everyone else that they could still make entertaining movies. This was before Disney entered the picture, of course, but it wasn’t the moment their downfall was guaranteed. Nor was it when they fired Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish or Patty Jenkins. When they fired Gunn, the circle could no longer hold, and things began to fall apart (somewhere, Eternals 2 is slouching towards multiplexes, waiting to flop).
Audience fatigue would always have set in at a certain point, but one could point to over-saturation or a change in the theatrical landscape as an excuse, had they stayed on course. Now, anybody who wants to say that most Marvel movies are pretty bad has an entire phase’s worth of product to point to. But that’s what makes Vol. 3 special: It is what its relatives wish that they could be but could never actually manage. It harkens back to a time not so long ago in which one could emerge from these movies talking about the movie itself — quoting a joke or talking about the plot, or if you’re a solo moviegoer, humming a tune — instead of simply trying to figure out where it slots in on the jigsaw puzzle that is whatever Secret Wars winds up being or what Disney+ show you needed to watch in order to understand what was going on.
One might be tempted to say that this might herald a new birth of creativity for the MCU, but based on the reaction that the trailer for The Marvels got from my audience, I’d suggest that the damage might have been well-and-fully done. Gunn has left for a more creatively-involved role at DC. The majority of his cast has gone —apologies, spoilerphobes, but the end title card, normally reading “The Guardians of the Galaxy will return,” is altered here — and some have left on acrimonious terms for better pastures (Big Dave going to Big Dune). And no matter how many ‘70s songs they license or colors they fling on the screen, it feels like this is the true finale for what we knew as The Marvel Cinematic Universe, much like how Disney’s other long-running jewel, The Simpsons ended somewhere around 2002. It’ll keep going, sure, but when people bring Marvel up in conversation, they won’t be thinking of Gorr the God-Butcher or Ikaris or Taskmaster or Namor: They’ll be thinking of how Tony Stark built this in a cave with a box of scraps or how Wakanda looked in 2018, or everyone getting dusted before Steve Rogers managed to finally say the line that people had waited for 30-odd films to see him say before these heroes’ greatest triumph. And, of course, even if they don’t know it, they’ll be thinking of James Gunn.