James Gunn Says Infinity Stones Lore Took Just Minutes to Create
James Gunn, the director of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, surprised fans recently by saying that he created the Infinity Stones’ backstory for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in just three minutes. These powerful objects later became the main focus of the entire Infinity Saga, which covered the first three phases of the MCU.
Gunn talked about this during an interview with GQ. He looked back at his work on several big films and eventually spoke about his time at Marvel Studios. According to him, the creation of the Infinity Stones lore was not some carefully planned process. In fact, it happened almost by accident. Gunn said that he didn’t even know what “phases” meant in the MCU when he was asked to help with the stones.
He explained, “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?’”
Gunn shared that he then sat down and wrote the explanation quickly, without much guidance from Marvel. “Literally, it was me sitting down for three minutes and writing that,” he said. That short write-up became the official origin and explanation of the Infinity Stones for the entire franchise.
According to Gunn, Marvel gave him no detailed plan or long list of instructions. They simply told him that “the red thing and the blue thing” from earlier films were supposed to be Infinity Stones, and asked him to make sense of it.
He said that when he wrote the scene where The Collector, played by Benicio del Toro, explains the stones in Guardians of the Galaxy, it was based entirely on what he had made up in those few minutes.
Gunn also revealed something interesting about the Power Stone. In Guardians of the Galaxy, the Power Stone is purple, but that wasn’t always the case. It was supposed to be red at first. But then Marvel decided that a red object in Thor: The Dark World should be the Reality Stone, so the Power Stone was changed to purple during post-production.
The Infinity Stones, of course, are inspired by the Infinity Gems from Marvel Comics, where they were originally called Soul Gems.
Gunn’s comments show that one of the MCU’s biggest storylines, the entire hunt for the Infinity Stones leading to Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, was not carefully planned from the start. Instead, it grew from a simple explanation written in just minutes by a director who didn’t even know what an MCU phase was.
What began as a rushed piece of lore ended up shaping the most important storyline in Marvel’s movie universe.
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