Why James Gunn Was Ready To Quit Movies Before Landing Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy

"Television has taken the place of the art film in a lot of ways," said James Gunn in a semi-recent episode of the Smartless podcast (hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes), to highlight the point he was making to his agents about why he considered quitting the film business entirely over 11 years ago. And he was not wrong. Of course, this happened way before he got hired and hit the jackpot with "Guardians of the Galaxy," but it's easy to see where he was coming from. From the mid-aughts to the early 2010s, the writer-director was primarily making niche stuff in comedy television as well as on the big screen. His quirky directorial feature debut, "Slither," was a box office flop in 2006 (even though it later became a cult film), and his follow-up with the amusingly strange and raw "Super" didn't fare much better either.

He simply wasn't finding his audience (or success) on the silver screen, and thought that a transition to dedicate himself entirely to the small screen (which he was already familiar with) was the right move to make. As he explained:

"I had actually told my agents that I didn't want to focus on film anymore. I said, it's like no movies are taken seriously, they aren't part of the cultural conversation, unless it's like a Hulk movie or a Marvel movie or something. I'm making these lower-budget films, they just aren't resonating. I had just signed the deal to do another TV pilot, which I'd always done. And I was like, it seems like the really creative space for writers these days, and even directors, is in television. That's where you can kind of do what you want."

I said this before, but sometimes I still wonder how Gunn and his career would've turned out if he didn't go the superhero route in the early/mid-2010s. This podcast episode with him is intriguing because he actually admits that he was ready to go all in with television — which would've made a lot of sense for someone like him, who started out primarily as a writer in entertainment. Even now, he's still heavily involved in TV stuff — as the creator of the hit HBO Max shows "Peacemaker" and "Creature Commandos" — but those opportunities came after he became a bigshot Marvel director and then the co-CEO of DC Studios. So, in a way, he didn't completely abandon that change of direction and managed to split his time between doing blockbusters like "Superman" (read our review here) and the creatively more nuanced and liberating smaller projects on television.

Don't get me wrong, he deserved every praise and success coming his way for turning a barely-popular and niche comic book series into a global phenomenon by portraying a bunch of eccentric outcasts with humor and vulnerability. There's no dismissing that (and I love those movies to death), but there will always be a curiosity in me that would've wanted to see what he could've come up with if that didn't happen. I guess we'll never know (unless there's an alternate universe), but the idea of Gunn making it big in television (outside of the superhero genre) is always going to be an entertaining "what if" thought exercise for long-time fans.