There is a lot riding on Thunderbolts as Marvel projects have consistently disappointed in recent months, however, could the movie have looked different had Disney not fired James Gunn?
In 2018, Disney/Marvel made a decision that started a domino effect, ending in one of their greatest assets becoming the head of the studio’s greatest rival. We’re of course talking about the sacking of James Gunn five years ago. At the time, Gunn was set to take on more responsibility, leading the cosmic storylines and taking the MCU to places it had never been. However after some old tweets from the director led to a significant backlash, Gunn was let go before promptly being re-hired.
As we all know, this led to DC nabbing the director for its soft reboot of The Suicide Squad which in turn resulted in Gunn taking the role of heading the entire DCU. It’s like a story straight out of a comic book, Marvel ended up creating its own arch-nemesis. The landscape of the MCU could have looked very different by now, had the director never been let go.
What would Gunn have done?
One fan in the Marvel Studios subreddit wondered if Gunn’s presence would have changed the Thunderbolts line-up. After all, his line-up for The Suicide Squad was somewhat unconventional but it worked. Fans speculated on the villains the Guardians of the Galaxy director would have picked for the band of anti-heroes.
“Pretty sure you would not have U.S. Agent–just not dimensional enough for a James Gunn lineup. Yelena and Alexei would be good fits, and you’d probably get a more comic-accurste [sic], wise-cracking Taskmaster in there. Bullseye and Green Goblin would be the type of wildcards that would be a lot of fun in a Gunn flick and make the team feel much edgier than a bunch of antiheroes.”
While that’s true, the director often opts for even more unknown characters so perhaps we would have gotten some great obscure villains like Blizzard or Radioactive Man.
Would he have even been involved?
Others correctly pointed out that Gunn was never in line to direct or even have anything to do with the movie so he likely wouldn’t have affected the outcome.
“he wouldn’t be directing thunderbolts if he was still working for marvel.
because he was initially in charge of charting out Marvel Cosmic. I would guess that would lead to a lot of executive producer credits on stuff like Eternals, F4, whatever the hell is gonna be done with the Nova Corps.”
That’s a fair point, so the reality is that Gunn may not have really had much of an effect on the line-up. Although, who knows? He is arguably one of the best for these types of team-up films so it’s hard to believe he would have had no input whatsoever. Suffice to say, the line-up for Thunderbolts is looking solid so far, But we’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out.