Each ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Film Has A Master Playlist Of Over 500 Songs

Delivering a stellar soundtrack isn’t easy work for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. It requires director James Gunn to compile over 500 songs to fit the themes of each movie.

Gunn, perhaps the most engaged of all Marvel directors on social media, explained his approach to compiling music for the two films he has made so far. “Each of the 3 films has a separate master playlist with over 500 songs (there’s some overlap between the playlists),” Gunn wrote. “These are whittled down to lists around 100 songs & finally to the Awesome Mixes. Perhaps someday I’ll release the master playlists.”

Check out the tweet from Gunn below.

As the herd of songs is thinned out into a tighter playlist, Gunn and his crew are sure to stay in tune with the soundtrack while making the movies as to avoid getting off-beat.

“Most the songs get played while shooting scenes on he Guardians films – often in ear buds in my ears, the camera crew & the cast – so we know exactly what we’re shooting to rhythmically & tonally,” Gunn wrote. “We also record much of Tyler Bates’ score before shooting & play that on set too.”

With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 on the horizon and production expected to begin sooner than later, Gunn’s playlist must be coming together nicely at this point. Don’t expect the director to drop any hints about the musical experience in the upcoming film, though. Gunn actively avoids dropping any sort of spoilers for films he or other filmmakers are hard at work on.

Gunn’s musical selection is so impressive, the directors of Avengers: Infinity War actually chose a song from Gunn’s list to accompany the Guardians of the Galaxy during their entry scene in the ensemble film.

“It was a while for us to figure out what we were going to do with the Guardians’ entrance in the movie,” Joe Russo told ComicBook.com. “We talked about a lot of different potential cue ideas. James obviously has a list of a thousand songs that would fit in any future potential Guardians movies, and we did peruse that list as part of our process. I do think that ultimately a cue that we settled on came from James’ list.”

Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War are now playing in theaters. Ant-Man and The Wasp is set for release on July 6, 2018. Captain Marvel will follow it on March 6, 2019, with the untitled Avengers 4 set to tie everything about the Marvel Cinematic Universe into a bow on May 3, 2019.

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