MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: There was going to be a Skrull in the original Guardians of the Galaxy.

As you likely know by now, the Skrulls, those evil little shapeshifting aliens, will be the main villains of the upcoming Captain Marvel film that will be set during the 1990s. The Skrulls being involved in that film leaves open the possibility that the Skrulls might have been operating in other areas of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

An interesting aspect of the Skrulls appearing in Captain Marvel is that they even COULD appear in that movie, as the way that the movie rights for various Marvel characters have been split up over the years, it seemed as though the Skrulls would be part of the Fantastic Four rights and thus belong to Fox (before the current Disney purchase of Fox's movie studio). However, former Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn explained a few years back that the way that the deal works is that Marvel Studios can use the Skrulls, they just can't use any SPECIFIC Skrulls. Any specific Skrulls, like the Super-Skrull, are part of the Fantastic Four movie rights. This apparently is the same for a few other notable alien races. Like you could use the Watchers, but you couldn't use Uatu.

In any event, Gunn was actually planning on using a Skrull in the first Guardians of the Galaxy film back in 2014!

In an interview with Eric Eisenberg at Cinemablend, Gunn explained where the Skrull would appear in the film:

No, [Marvel] never said no. [They] said yes! It's something that we've talked a lot about dealing with. I almost put a Skrull in the Ravagers. But I'm really excited they're coming about, and I think it's going to be fun to see where they go from there, and what happens with the Skrulls in the future of the Marvel Universe. I'm a huge fan of the Skrulls.

Yep, there was going to be a Skrull member of Yondu's band of pirates known as the Ravagers!

Gunn then explained why he ultimately decided not to do it:

I think it's all a matter of how many things you have in a movie. I find that one of the things with writing these movies is that they start off incredible complicated, and then I have go, 'Uhhhh' and cut some of this great stuff... So often times there's a lot of different elements, whether it's scenes or characters or cameos or whatever, you end up cutting down, down, down, down until you get to what the movie is. Because there's an elegance in the simplicity that's incredibly important in these movies, because they are complicated! They're in outer-space, we don't know where they are, there's a lot of characters, so how do you cut that down to what the most necessary components of the stories are?

The legend is...

STATUS: True

Thanks to Eric Eisenberg and James Gunn for the information!

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