James Gunn Confesses The One Thing at Marvel He Never Understood: “I Have No Clue”

James Gunn spent a good amount of time playing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe sandbox with his Guardians of the Galaxy films, which helped define the tone of Marvel’s storytelling during the Infinity Saga.

But, as Gunn now reveals, there’s one big piece of the Marvel puzzle that never made sense to him… the infamous “phases.”

In a recent interview with GQ, Gunn didn’t hold back when asked about how the MCU organizes its timeline:

“I never understood what any of the 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.”

Gunn was there at a pivotal moment when Marvel was shaping the Infinity Stones storyline. He was asked to include them in his first Guardians movie. The now-iconic scene with The Collector (Benicio del Toro) explaining the Stones? Gunn wrote it… fast.

“I wrote that scene in about three minutes, and they just said, ‘Explain what the Infinity Stones are,’ and I wrote it, and that was it.”

Despite having a hand in one of the most important bits of MCU lore, Gunn didn’t know how it all fit into the bigger picture.

Marvel, at the time, had just started threading the Infinity Stones into its wider narrative. They’d appeared in earlier films, but there wasn’t a grand unified plan until Marvel committed to the idea of crossover storytelling. When Gunn wrote Guardians, they told him to anchor one of the Stones in his movie’s story.

But even then, the process wasn’t exactly seamless. Gunn originally thought his Stone would be red, until he was told that the red one had already appeared in Thor: The Dark World. So, his got changed to purple… in post.

The earlier phases of Marvel had clear beats. Phase One ended with The Avengers, Phase Two with Ant-Man (weirdly), and Phase Three with the emotional capstone of Endgame. But now, with TV shows folded into the mix and less cohesion overall, it’s easy to understand Gunn’s confusion.

Even Ironheart recently marked the end of Phase Five, despite fans expecting Thunderbolts* to take that spot. That inconsistency further proves Gunn’s point: the “phases” are more of a loose framework than a carefully mapped strategy, at least from the filmmaker’s perspective.

In the end, Gunn as gunn was playing in the Marvel sandbox, he just wasn’t entirely sure which part of the playground he was standing in.