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Why the 'Guardians of the Galaxy' Screenwriter Threw a 'F#$% James Gunn' Party

By Dustin Rowles | Film | October 20, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | October 20, 2023 |


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Unlike Sam Bankman-Fried, I am an avid reader, in part because — unlike television series and movies — reading a book doesn’t feel like I’m doing my job. It was thus a ridiculous pleasure and privilege to read a book by a good friend and longtime former writer of Pajiba, Joanna Robinson. I won’t “review” it because that’s a conflict of interest. Still, I will say I enjoyed the hell out of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, which she spent the last several years writing along with the terrific Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards, whom I do not know.

I’m not an MCU megafan, and yet the book — which just landed on the NYTimes Bestseller List — is fascinating even to the casual superhero moviegoer. There are a lot of insights into, for instance, what a dick Ed Norton was on The Incredible Hulk. There’s much about Joss Whedon’s experience in the MCU and the full story on Edgar Wright’s decision to abandon Ant-Man. Maybe the most unexpectedly exciting arc is how much the toy manufacturing side of Marvel factored into the films. Ike Perlmutter is the villain of the book and genuinely the reason why it took so long to get Captain Marvel and Black Panther. I hate him.

But there are also fascinating contractual issues, like the fact that Marvel can put Hulk in as many movies as it wants, but because of licensing rights, they’re essentially foreclosed financially from making a stand-alone Hulk film. The Sony/Marvel saga around Spider-Man is also riveting, as are several disputes over screenwriting credits. Zak Penn, for instance, thought that Joss Whedon was a real dick for trying to take sole credit for The Avengers screenplay, while Nicole Perlman was similarly pissed off at James Gunn for trying to take sole credit for the Guardains of the Galaxy screenplay.

From MCU: The Reign of Marvel:

“Perlman declined to challenge Gunn publicly, saying “I credit everybody on that movie, including James, for making it so beautiful.” However, her friend Zack Stentz (cowriter of the Thor screenplay), objected on her behalf: “Nicole had to knife-fight for her credit on Guardians of the Galaxy. But she is probably the preeminent female action tentpole writer now because she was the first woman to have her name on not just a Marvel movie but a Marvel movie that people really love. She threw a party when the movie came out literally called the “Fuck James Gunn” party because she had won that very bruising credit arbitration. The thing that I’m still angry about, and I say this as a fan of James Gunn as a director, was that he was very clearly selectively leaking stuff to his friends and the fanboy media circles to undermine her credit. When Matthew Vaughn decided to have a temper tantrum over the fact that we got screen credit [on X-Men: First Class], at least he did it under his own name.”

I also like James Gunn as a director, but James Gunn does use the fanboys to wage war in the media. But that’s the kind of MCU gossip that Robinson, Gonzales, and Edwards provide in MCU, which is on sale now (and Joanna herself reads the prologue if you’re into audiobooks).