He might be taking his time to build the all-new DCU (with a production Bible to match), but when it came to creating a crucial piece of lore within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, James Gunn spent about the same amount of time creating it as it would take to read this article. In a recent interview with GQ, the "Superman" director reflected on his time across the street with the other blockbuster superhero franchise and explained how he casually came up with the idea of the Infinity Stones. It turns
out that making some of the most powerful objects in the universe isn't as complicated as you might think.
It was in Gunn's first Marvel movie, "Guardians of the Galaxy," that besides dealing with Vin Diesel's line delivery, we finally got a full breakdown of the Infinity Stones that the Mad Titan, Thanos (Josh Brolin), was so obsessed with. However, even the director admits he didn't fully understand everything at first. "I knew there were Infinity Stones when they said, 'You know, we have been thinking, and we think maybe some of these things have been Infinity Stones in different ways. And so, could you write up what the Infinity Stones mean?'" From there, the challenge was to map out what would become the core element of one of the biggest franchises in movie history, before he moved on to make his own. No big deal, right?
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James Gunn Didn't Know How Big Of A Deal The Infinity Stones Were Going To Become
Looking back at the history of the MCU, "Guardians of the Galaxy" was easily one of its biggest gambles, so appointing the man who wrangled them together to also come up with the origin of the Infinity Stones was even more of a risk. Luckily, Gunn didn't feel the pressure of what he was creating and simply skimmed over the whole thing. "When I wrote the scene with The Collector explaining that, you know, there was this explosion, and then the Infinity Stones were born, and what they mean and where they came from, that was me just literally sitting down for three minutes and writing that," Gunn explained. "And that's then what became the rest of the Infinity Stones."
At this point in the timeline, the MCU was still in its early stages, with the Guardians arriving on screens only six years after Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) had announced himself as Iron Man. Like many plot points in the MCU, no one really had a clear idea of the billion-dollar franchise that was developing. "I had no idea that was gonna become what it was gonna become," Gunn admitted. Even now, the head of the DC universe said he struggles to understand how the eras of the MCU are divided. "I never understood what any of those phases were in Marvel. I don't know what any of it means, like, I have no clue what it means. I have no clue what any of that stuff ever meant." Well, world-building can get complicated sometimes.
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