Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 Script Originally Planned for a Stan Lee Cameo

Stan Lee's long record of Marvel movie cameos stretches back as far as The Trial of the Incredible Hulk and went all the way up until Avengers: Endgame, which was released after Lee had passed away. The Marvel Comics legend appeared across movies, animation, and video games, and played dozens of different roles over the course of the decades -- some of whom were just versions of Stan Lee. According to the commentary track for Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3, not only did James Gunn write a character he planned to use as Stan Lee's cameo appearance -- but the character did make the movie's final cut.

In fact, the character -- Lambshank, a freakish abomination seen in the High Evolutionary's dungeons -- was ultimately voiced by James Gunn in the finished film. That's Gunn's third MCU role, after providing voices for a Sakkaran soldier in Guardians of the Galaxy and Groot's smartwatch in the I Am Groot episode "Groot's Pursuit."

"I originally wrote Lambshank, the character I played, for Stan Lee," Gunn explained. "Because I wrote the movie before Stan passed on, and I also knew he was getting much older, and it would be hard to bring him to Atlanta to shoot, so I did a character that I could just animate and then have him do the voice and have a little Stan Lee-like face on the character, but unfortunately, Stan passed -- who I really enjoyed working with and directing so many times over these movies."

Obviously, Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 has been in the works for longer than almost any other single Marvel movie. When Vol. 2 was released in theaters in 2017, Gunn was already promising fans a third outing for the team. Gunn was briefly fired from the film, and by the time Disney hired him back, he had committed to The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, further delaying the production and post-production on Guardians. Lee passed away in November 2018 at age 95.

In Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 our beloved band of misfits are settling into life on Knowhere. But it isn't long before their lives are upended by the echoes of Rocket's turbulent past," the synopsis reads. "Peter Quill, still reeling from the loss of Gamora, must rally his team around him on a dangerous mission to save Rocket's life-a mission that, if not completed successfully, could quite possibly lead to the end of the Guardians as we know them.

The movie now in theaters, and releases today on digital video on demand platforms. It comes to Blu-ray and DVD in August.