Marvel Creative Committee Was So Clueless, They Wanted To Cut The Awesome Mix From ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’
Not all studio notes are terrible. Early drafts ofGood Will Huntingincluded a subplot about Will going on the run from the FBI, but writers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were encouraged to cut that and the movie is better off for it. But sometimes you come across a studio note that’s so awful, it would have altered the entire vibe of a movie so drastically that the final product as we know it today might not even have been recognizable if they got their wish.
Such is the case with an anecdote shared by writer/directorJames Gunnin Vanity Fair’s big Marvel Studios cover story yesterday. Gunn explained that the Marvel Creative Committee – a now disbanded group of advisors who used to have major creative input on Marvel movies – tried to get him to remove the Awesome Mix soundtrack fromGuardians of the Galaxy.
The biggest news from the in-depthVanity Faircover story was about howAvengers 4will mark the end of the Marvel Cinematic Universeas we know it and how the studiohas 20 more movies plannedfor the future (and they’ll continue to make more after that). But Gunn shared an interesting story about conflicts he had while makingGuardians of the Galaxy– namely, butting heads with Marvel’s Creative Committee, a group put together by the reclusive (and notoriously stingy) Marvel Entertainment head Ike Perlmutter. It consisted of Marvel Entertainment presidentAlan Fine, Marvel Comics writerBrian Michael Bendis, Marvel Comics publisherDan Buckley, and Marvel Entertainment CCOJoe Quesada, but the group was disbanded (or at least, relegated to the TV realm) when Marvel Studios headKevin Feigethreatened to quitover disputes and Disney CEOBob Igerrestructured the company so Feige no longer needed to answer to Perlmutter.
Here’s an excerpt from VF about Gunn’s experience:
Director James Gunn chalked up every conflict he had makingGuardians of the Galaxyto Perlmutter and the Marvel “creative committee”—a legacy of the studio’s early days—which read every script and gave writers and filmmakers feedback. Said Gunn, “They were a group of comic-book writers and toy people” who gave him “haphazard” notes. The committee, for example, suggestedGuardians of the Galaxyditch the 70s music that the film’s hero loves.
That music is so ingrained into the very identity of that movie, so the notion of just swapping out the ’70s jams for…well, anything else, really, strikes me as ridiculous. Were the committee members afraid that the younger audience wouldn’t be able to relate to those older songs? And dare I even wonder what they wanted Gunn to replace his chosen selections with instead?
Either way, Gunn was vindicated when his soundtrack went platinum, and Feige now happily runs Marvel Studios without the interference of the creative committee, so it all worked out in the end.
