Unused Guardians of the Galaxy endings reveal that sadness is banned in the MCU, The Guardians of the Galaxy dvd comes out next week (BluRay following a few weeks later) and director James Gunn is making the press rounds to promote the extras, including stuff that was left out of the ending:
There are three characters that got cut out [of the "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" montage]: Nebula, the Collector and Grandpa Quill. Nebula and Collector we decided, at a certain point, they’re kind of bad guys in the first movie. It was a real joyous experience with that finale so we thought we’d keep it to the characters that were part of “the good team.” Which includes Yondu. He did fight on the good guys side. So we thought we would keep it to them.
Grandpa Quill we cut because he was in old age make up and we were a little afraid people wouldn’t recognize that it was him from the beginning of the movie. And also, it was a pretty sad moment. It was Grandpa Quill and he has this photograph of Meredith and Peter as a little boy and he looks up at the stars and we go up to the stars and it was really sweet. It means that he must have seen Quill getting abducted at the end of that day and is still waiting for him to return but it was freaking sad so we took it out.
Nebula’s was actually my favorite. Nebula’s I really liked a lot because she’s lost her arm and she’s just pissed off and she’s just walking through this field all pissed off with a busted Ravager vehicle behind her. And she’s just pissed off and I loved it.
You can see how all of these might have added to the film a bit. The Mary Sue link above does a good job of showing how adding to Nebula’s story would have been cool, as her arc with Gamora wasn’t really worked out all the way. But the bit with the grandpa…yes it sounds sad, and I know the ending was all Buckaroo Banzai triumphal stuff…but would it really hurt to be LITTLE sad sometime, Marvel? Not Agent Coulson is dead but he’s getting his own TV series sad, but human beings are frail and life is tragic and beautiful and it isn’t all exoskeletons and CGI sad. Feelings.
Guardians broke a lot of MArvel molds, but it ended up being a ragtag bunch of heroes who save the whole freakin’ universe again. Superhero movies have fallen into a rote pattern of gaudy noisiness without much actual human emotion involved. I mean we don’t have to have Cinema Paradiso or Alexander Payne, but like…a sad grandpa? Is that really too much?
None of these scenes will be on the DVD BTW. Saving them for the ultra super deluxe version I guess. OH and here’s the trailer for the DVD:
