See Stan Lee's Deleted 'Guardians Of The Galaxy' Cameo

Stan Lee has inspired the lives of so many collectors, it would have made sense for The Collector himself to have Stan Lee. That was the original plan in Guardians of the Galaxy. Over the weekend, writer/director James Gunn revealed his first idea for Lee's cameo was to be a piece The Collector's Museum. He would've joined the Chituari soldier, Dark Elf, Adam Warlock's cocoon, Cosmo and Howard the Duck. Groot would have discovered the Marvel legend and Lee would've flipped him off.Initial reports were that Disney rejected this but Gunn has now come out and said that's not the case. In fact, he actually shot the scene and just didn't think it worked that well in the film. Below, you can see an image from the deleted Stan Lee Guardians of the Galaxy cameo scene and read Gunn's story.

Here's the image from Gunn's Instagram.

And here's what Gunn said about it:

At a panel on Sunday at Dragoncon, I talked about a deleted @realstanlee cameo in Guardians, and promised the folks there I'd post a photo on Instagram – so here it is! As you can see, this is not Stan, but a double. In the original cut of the film, when the Guardians enter the Collector's museum, Rocket looks over and sees Cosmo the dog in one display case, Quill looks over into another display case and is surprised by a tentacle slapping against the glass, and Groot looks over and sees, in another display case, Stan Lee. In one take, Stan Lee just slowly turns up his finger, flipping off Groot. We shot this footage with a Stan Lee double because Stan wasn't able to come to the UK at the time. The plan was to shoot Stan in the same lighting when I was back in LA, and we'd digitally replace the double's head with Stan's actual head (not quite as difficult as it sounds). Although I thought the cameo was funny, I thought the flipping off joke was too similar to the moment earlier in the film where Quill flips off the Nova Corps, so I excised that part of it immediately. A couple of the guys at Marvel thought Stan Lee in a case was too broad of a joke in general, and that it took the audience out of the movie. I argued about it for a bit, but we ended up not keeping it in the film. In a pretty typical case of Internet-journalism-telephone, articles online yesterday said that Disney forbade the scene because of standards . However, that's incorrect – no one at Disney ever even saw the scene, and it was cut solely for creative reasons.